Posted May 29, 2025 by Rose A. McCandless, DS Manuscript Data Curation Graduate Fellow
One aspect of my job as the DS Manuscript Data Curation Graduate Fellow is to assist with the review and enrichment of our institutional members’ manuscript data. One of our institutional policies is that, upon reconciliation or enrichment of our members’ data, we do not correct the data we receive from institutions. We link to external authorities and standardize the forms of names and terms, but we do not correct spelling errors, nor do we change the actual content of the description. We do, however, occasionally become aware of errors or issues in institutional data which, instead of changing ourselves, we can alert our member institutions to. This way, member institutions have the ability to make changes in their own data, which will then be updated in the DS Catalog once the institution provides their data again in an annual refresh (which will then enable any changes made in the past year to be reflected in the DS Catalog).
One recent instance that I flagged to an institution was a few script notes in the data from one of our recently-joined members, the Newberry Library in Chicago, that utilize certain terminology improperly. The impetus for my review of the Newberry data was a project that the DS team and I have been developing for the past two years, working to input our members’ manuscript records into Wikidata (N.B. I am still working on the Newberry’s Wikidata upload, but these records should be available in Wikidata in the near future). This project, which has prompted me to think deeply about the nature of manuscript cataloging in the twenty-first century, is intended to expand the discoverability of our institutional members’ manuscript data beyond even the exposure they get from inclusion in the DS Catalog. Wikidata is built on the principles of Linked Open Data, meaning that every relationship between entities in Wikidata (which can be anything! People, places, things, etc.) is linked to other entities in Wikidata and elsewhere on the web, expanding our understanding of the vast network of connections between all of the items described. (I am currently in the process of completing my MLIS capstone project discussing this process and its implications for manuscript description, which I anticipate turning into an article for publication, so keep an eye out if this topic is of interest!)
While engaging in these open-access data processes, contributing to the greater data environment, I am prompted to think intensively about the ways in which we describe our manuscripts and how this can be translated into a Linked Open Data atmosphere. Script classification is one area that requires careful consideration, and even in a seemingly newfangled data world, I always return to the authoritative and scholarly terminologies that manuscript catalogers have relied on for decades. The terminology used widely to describe Gothic scripts was originally proposed by Gerard I. Lieftinck, developed further by J. Peter Gumbert, and expanded by Albert Derolez in his indispensable 2003 monograph The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books from which many will recognize terms like “formata,” “libraria,” “currens,” etc. etc. This is the commonly-used system of descriptive terminology used by medieval manuscript catalogers to elucidate the specific features of Gothic scripts.
This system of Gothic script classification, however, is used to describe only Gothic scripts. Other systems of handwriting from medieval Western Europe, such as the Carolingian or humanist scripts, are described using other forms of classification and terminology; the Lieftinck/Gumbert/Derolez system describes specific features and aspects of Gothic. Naturally, there are fluid lines between these systems of handwriting that transitioned into and out of one another, but all of the above scholars are very specific in their use of the system only for the category of scripts that was widespread throughout the late 12th-16th centuries in Western Europe. Indeed, in his chapter of the 2020 Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography (ed. Coulson and Babcock), “The Nomenclature of Gothic Scripts,” Derolez does not even feel the need to define Gothic script because it has been so clearly explicated in his 2003 monograph and innumerable other works in the field of manuscript studies.
While I was reviewing data from the Newberry Library, I noticed a few discrepancies in the script notes. These notes mistakenly applied descriptors intended to classify Gothic scripts to other forms of script, ex. “caroline textualis formata” and “humanistic cursive currens.” Although some words, like “cursive” are perfectly appropriate to describe Carolingian and humanist scripts, those specifically outlined by Lieftinck et al. are not appropriate in this context.
This was an opportunity, then, for me to flag this issue to the folks at the Newberry, who were naturally already aware of it. What I was able to contribute was a comprehensive list of all manuscript records that include improper script terminology, noting the shelfmarks and terms used, which I then shared with the Newberry. Thus, they will have a guide that will hopefully make the correction of these records easier. This enabled me, while working through the Newberry data, to identify a potential area for improving the metadata, which will be incorporated into both the Newberry’s institutional data repository(/ies) and the DS Catalog. Even though we don’t correct data while enriching it, we can and do flag irregularities and communicate them to the institutional stewards. This is one of many ways that the data review that is accomplished by contribution of data to Digital Scriptorium benefits our institutional members, beyond discoverability and interoperability.
Identifying issues is not the only way that the DS team can assist institutions improve their metadata. I described a number of manuscripts in the Rochester Institute of Technology collection during my fellowship. This collection contains a number of leaves that were dispersed as part of Otto Ege’s famous Fifty Original Leaves from Medieval Manuscripts series, and when I was initially tasked with RIT’s metadata creation for DS, I was not anticipating contributing to the description of the Ege leaves. Scott Gwara’s fantastic monograph on the Ege manuscripts, Otto Ege’s Manuscripts (2013, but I believe a second edition is in the works) is extremely comprehensive, and the description of the leaves in RIT’s existing repository was already quite good. What the existing RIT records did not include, and what I was able to contribute to these records, were the identification numbers from Gwara’s handlist of manuscripts identified with Ege and a reference pointing the user to Gwara’s book. Gwara’s handlist numbers have become a common way to refer to manuscripts owned by Otto Ege, and thus I was able to provide additional information in these preexisting records that orients the leaves in relation to their parent codices and points the user in the direction of the scholarly monograph on the topic.
The aspects of institutional data that we notice, flag, and offer improvements on are thus not limited to issues of terminology and descriptors, but can extend to identifiers and connections with useful scholarship. Our DS data processes provide a second, third, etc. set of eyes on the complete datasets of our member institutions, allowing the identification of things that have previously fallen through the cracks (completely understandably!). We hope, intend, and believe that this review contributes to the symbiosis that exists between DS and our member institutions; it’s a cycle of enriching, expanding, and connecting data on a continual basis, always working to improve our understanding of these manuscripts and their relationships to one another.
References
Derolez, Albert. The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books: From the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Derolez, Albert. “The Nomenclature of Gothic Scripts.” In The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography, ed. Frank T. Coulson and Robert G. Babcock, pp. 301-20. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2020. DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195336948.013.59.
Gwara, Scott. Otto Ege’s manuscripts: a study of Ege’s manuscript collections, portfolios, and retail trade: with a comprehensive handlist of manuscripts collected or sold. Cayce, SC: De Brailes Publishing, 2013.
For more on Otto Ege and Ege studies, see Davis, Lisa Fagin. “Fragmentation and Fragmentology: A Century of Ege Studies,” in Medieval Manuscripts and their Provenance: Essays in Honor of Barbara A. Shailor, ed. A. S. G. Edwards, pp. 99-115. Suffolk, U.K. and Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2024.
For more on LOD and GLAM institutions, see Burrows, Toby, Deb Verhoeven, and Mike Jones. “Selling Our Soul (For Total Control?): Linked Open Data and GLAM.” In The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities, ed. I. G. Russell and G. Layne-Worthy, 187-203. Oxfordshire, U.K.: Routledge, 2024. DOI:10.4324/9781003327738-16.