Fragmentarium: Digital Research Laboratory for Medieval Manuscript Fragments

Fragmentarium is an international digital research lab for medieval manuscript fragments that enables libraries, collectors, researchers and students to publish medieval manuscript fragments, allowing them to catalogue, describe, transcribe, assemble and re-use them online.

It aims:

• to increase awareness of medieval fragments
• to make them more accessible and thus open new avenues of investigation and further medieval fragment research in general
• to improve networking and cooperation between fragment collections, manuscript and fragment scholars, digital humanities specialists and specialists for text and image recognition
• to promote digital fragmentology and research on manuscript fragments in the digital age
• to virtually reconstruct manuscripts from their dismembered parts
• to create an international inventory of medieval manuscript fragments

Fragments of medieval manuscripts offer an as-yet largely unexplored field of study. Except for isolated initiatives and individual, often spectacular discoveries, traditional manuscript research has so far only marginally undertaken work with fragments. The Internet offers extraordinary potential for overcoming some of the chief difficulties of traditional fragment research. Building on the technology developed by e-codices – Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, Fragmentarium offers an application for scholarly work with fragments. Collaborating with 16 partner institutions throughout Europe and the USA, the project aims, over the next years, to lay the foundations for research on medieval manuscript fragments by providing open standards and guidelines.

Partner libraries:

• Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich
• Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome
• Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, together with the BIBLISSIMA team for excellence
• Bodleian Library, together with St. Edmund Hall, University of Oxford
• Center for History and Palaeography – National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, Athens
• Harvard University Library, Cambridge MA, together with the Medieval Academy of America
• Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel
• Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna
• Stanford University Libraries
• Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen
• The British Library, London
• The Schøyen Collection, Oslo and London
• Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio meridionale
• Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig
• University of Pennsylvania Libraries, Philadelphia
• Yale University, New Haven