Cataloguing guidelines Palatini latini

Cataloguing guidelines for the project “Cataloguing of 876 medieval and early modern Latin manuscripts from the Heidelberg Bibliotheca Palatina in the Vatican Library in Rome.”

This indexing is based on the originals of four Codices Palatini latini at Heidelberg University Library (Cod. Pal. lat. 454, 729, 912 and 1969) as well as the Palatini latini available as digital facsimiles, which are now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

To deal with the huge number of manuscripts, it was necessary to develop a compact concept for the indexing of the codices in terms of content and codicology. An extensive cataloguing as it is demanded by the guidelines of the German Research Foundation (DFG) for manuscript description was excluded. Considering that high-quality digital copies of the manuscripts are now permanently and freely accessible, detailed information is obsolete with regard to a whole series of questions that previously had to be considered in the context of a proper description without direct access to the manuscript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.

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 become integrated into the web presentation of the manuscripts.

The descriptions are 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.

Manuscripts are omitted that have been described in two previous projects: The cataloguing of Classical Latin Texts in the Biblioteca Vaticana¹ on the one hand and the manuscript census of the library of Lorsch Monastery² made by Michael Kautz on the other.

__________

¹Les manuscrits classiques latins de la Bibliothèque Vaticane, Bd. 2.2, Les manuscrits classiques latins de la Bibliothèque Vaticane. Fonds Palatin, Rossi, Ste-Marie Majeure et Urbinate, beschr. von Jeannine FOHLEN / Colette JEUDY / Élisabeth PELLEGRIN / Yves-François RIOU, Paris 1982.

²Bibliothek und Skriptorium des ehemaligen Klosters Lorsch. Katalog der erhaltenen Handschriften, bearb. von Michael KAUTZ, 2 Bde., Wiesbaden 2016

Funded by:
DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft