Posted April 29, 2025 by Rose A. McCandless, DS Manuscript Data Curation Graduate Fellow
For this month’s blog post, I wanted to highlight a recent conversation within the Digital Scriptorium Advisory Council that underscores both the complexity and the necessity of defining a clear cataloging scope. As our catalog expands and adapts to new member institutions and new types of materials, we find ourselves repeatedly returning to foundational questions: What belongs in the DS Catalog? What doesn’t? And why?
Every catalog or digital collection must define its own boundaries. These boundaries help establish identity, manage capacity, and, crucially, ensure that the resource is usable and meaningful to its audiences. At DS, we refer to this boundary-setting as defining our “scope.” Our scope guidelines live here, but we are always discussing and interrogating what belongs in the DS Catalog based on a number of factors, from what materials we want our users to know they can find to the abilities (and limitations) of our team.
One of the most recurring and challenging areas we face in defining our scope is the inclusion (or exclusion) of Western European legal documents. Nearly every time we onboard a new member institution or evaluate a new batch of records, legal documentation re-enters the conversation. Should this notary instrument from the fifteenth century be included? What about a bound set of sixteenth-century court proceedings or accounts? Do these fall within DS’s mission of facilitating research into premodern scribal cultures?
These conversations often reveal tensions between different ways of understanding what DS is, what a manuscript is, and what our users need. I particularly wanted to discuss the issue of scope because it is emblematic of many of the methodological and field-defining questions that medievalists, scholars of premodern scribal cultures, librarians, and more are thinking about regularly.
Scribal Culture and the Legal Document
One of the key questions we ask ourselves is how legal documents relate to “scribal culture.” The scripts used in Western European legal documents have a fascinating development, one which is frequently (and necessarily) tied to the development of scripts in Western Europe overall, yet has its own trajectory and changing scribal practice. Early documents, dating from before the fourteenth century in particular, have significant paleographical value that will inform not only the study of the documents themselves, but the study of other types of manuscripts from the period. Once we start getting into the later Middle Ages, however, questions arise regarding the extent to which legal documents fit teleologically into the “era of the codex” that is DS’s primary scope limiter.
DS has always centered the manuscript codex as its core object of interest. If we take a look back through our (quite long, if I may say, for a digital humanities project) institutional history, the scope of DS has changed significantly in the redevelopment of the platform and organization during the DS 2.0 project. In the initial iteration of the Digital Scriptorium database, developed in the 1990s by a team of scholars who largely formed the core of American manuscript studies at the time, the scope of the catalog was limited to Western European/Latinate manuscript codices, excluding materials dated post-1600, fragments, and documents.
Legal documents, while not books, are undeniably manuscript artifacts. Many reflect unique regional scripts, formats, and transmission practices. They are also, critically, underrepresented in digital collections—particularly ones that specialize in premodern materials. From a paleographical and codicological perspective, legal documents offer vital insights into the practices of scribes operating outside of traditional literary or religious contexts. But their place within DS remains complicated.
Method vs. Mission
Much of the difficulty in our recent discussions centered not on whether legal documents have value (they clearly do!) but on whether they belong in the DS Catalog specifically. In part, this is a question of capacity. DS was founded at a time when digital infrastructure was more limited and scope restrictions were necessary for practical reasons, especially the issue of storage capacity and sustainability. Today’s DS is more expansive, both technologically and philosophically—but we are still bound by the finite resources of time, attention, and expertise.
There is also the risk of scope creep. Without clear guidelines, the DS Catalog could lose focus—and become less useful as a discovery tool for scholars looking for medieval and early modern books. This is where our organizational mission becomes crucial. DS is not a catch-all for every manuscript document or object, and we want to ensure that our users know what is, and what is not, included in DS so that they know whether DS will help answer their questions. As with all digital humanities projects, we are a research tool designed to provide a service to our users; if we do not limit the scope of our catalog’s content, we are not providing the intended service to our intended user group.
Inclusion by Necessity
One argument for the inclusion of legal documents is pragmatic: they have nowhere else to go. There is no centralized cataloging initiative for premodern legal manuscripts. If DS doesn’t document them, they may remain invisible to scholars and the public alike.
This touches on a deeper methodological debate: should we define scope by form, by function, or by user need? A fifteenth-century notarial document may not be a book—but it was created by a scribe, in manuscript form, and may hold as much research value as a manuscript codex. If our users are interested in studying scribal practices, legal history, or the evolution of scripts, do we do them a disservice by excluding these materials?
The DS team has agreed that pre-1600 legal documents can be included, especially when they originate within the same chronological and geographic bounds as our other materials. But we stop short of accepting post-1600 archival materials or bound institutional records. These fall outside the temporal and functional boundaries of what we define as “premodern” in the Western European context.
This is, of course, a culturally specific decision. As one Advisory Council member noted, Ethiopic manuscripts from the nineteenth century are entirely appropriate for DS, while Latin ones from the seventeenth are not. These inconsistencies reflect the cultural particularities of scribal practices and the limitations of our own training. Scholars from different traditions might well draw the line elsewhere, and that’s a good thing to acknowledge.
What Is DS?
Ultimately, defining catalog scope is about articulating identity. What is DS? What is it for?
To some, scope is about managing capacity. To others, it’s about defining a coherent intellectual and methodological framework. We’re certainly not going to solve the periodization problem, or to map manuscript culture in its entirety. Instead, we aim to be transparent about what we do and why we do it. If users know what kind of materials DS includes—and, just as importantly, what we don’t—they can better decide whether our catalog meets their research needs.
As our Advisory Council continues these conversations, we remain committed to balancing inclusivity with clarity, and scholarly value with usability. The debate over the scope of DS and other projects isn’t over—and that’s a good thing. Cataloging and classifying are not static. It evolves alongside our collections, our technologies, and our understanding of what a “manuscript” can be.