Cataloguing Guidelines Palatini graeci
The more than 400 Greek manuscripts of the former Bibliotheca Palatina were catalogued at Heidelberg University Library from November 2018 to March 2021 as part of the Polonsky Foundation Greek Manuscript Project: a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge and Heidelberg / Das Polonsky-Stiftungsprojekt zur Erschließung griechischer Handschriften: Ein Gemeinschaftsprojekt der Universitäten Cambridge und Heidelberg.
This indexing is based on the originals of the 29 Codices Palatini graeci at Heidelberg University Library as well as the Palatini graeci available as digital facsimiles, which are now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
Especially for these manuscripts, which are not kept in Heidelberg, it was necessary to develop a compact concept for the indexing of the codices in terms of content and codicology in view of the very limited funding period: thus, the measure and the collation of the manuscripts were recorded by student assistants from Heidelberg University Library during the digitisation in the rooms of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. The completely visible watermarks were also digitized, made accessible in the Heidelberg image and multimedia database heidICON and became integrated into the web presentation of the manuscript.
Due to the very limited funding period, extensive cataloguing as it is demanded by the guidelines of the German Research Foundation (DFG) for manuscript description was excluded. The abbreviated description pattern already developed for the cataloguing of the Palatini latini (“compact cataloguing”) was used and became adapted to the special features of the processing of Greek manuscripts.
The descriptions were transferred into the TEI-P5 format in order to form the basic source for further processing of the data in library networks (SWB, K10+) and to make the contents searchable in virtual library catalogues. The main target of the Polonsky project was to create public accessibility and making content available, which has so far been difficult or impossible to access.
In addition, there is another aspect: the high-quality digital copies of the manuscripts, which are now permanently and freely accessible, make detailed information obsolete with regard to a whole series of questions that previously had to be considered in the context of a proper description without direct access to the manuscript in question. Therefore, in the case of the Palatini graeci, it is no longer necessary to describe self-explanatory information from the digital copy.
Since, especially in the case of well-known codices, the number of publications runs into the hundreds, only standard works and literature important from a general point of view are mentioned in the descriptions. The relevant scholarly secondary literature is easily accessible, for example, via the electronic version of the journal Scriptorium.