![]() This book preserves a dialogue between the sexually promiscuous pagan comedies of antiquity and the Christian scribes who kept them for posterity just to think about this manuscript’s miraculous existence is to imagine a story more dramatic than Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. I can’t make much sense of the archaic script but the pictures are amazing – they include a page of Roman theatrical masks, as imagined by a medieval monk. It is equally beguiling to come across a manuscript of plays by the Roman writer Terence that was copied in the 12th century. I am never going to learn Hebrew now but it’s entrancing to look at venerable Jewish books in the Bodleian virtual library. Photograph: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford Instead the beauty is in the Hebrew words themselves and the chunky, opulent letters that preserve this precious testimony of European culture. Shir ha-yiḥud (1301-1350) There are none of the colourful illuminations of medieval Christian manuscripts in this 14th-century copy of a Jewish hymn. That is to say, this way of consulting a library replaces reading with seeing. It is like something out of a story by the librarian and fabulist Jorge Luis Borges in which all the great books and philosophies of the world have become one walk-through art gallery, their strange languages fusing into brilliant illuminations. Instead of an arduous activity undertaken by determined scholars, visiting the digital Bodleian is a pleasant browse through the virtual past that all of us can undertake. You can do all the online things people love to do online, from assembling your own collection of favourites to taking a selfie with Cicero (except the latter), but the most intriguing aspect of this and other digital rarity collections is that it changes the nature of research. ![]() Oxford’s Bodleian, one of Europe’s greatest and oldest libraries, is the latest to do so with digital.bodleian giving users unprecedented opportunities to browse precious volumes and their wondrous illustrations from our armchairs, if anyone still has armchairs, or cafe stool or even in a punt (it’s Oxford after all). See the 3D image of the Bodleian coffer on Cabinet, here.One way libraries are opening their secret worlds to everyone is by putting some of their most curious or majestic items online. (Oxford Palaeography and Manuscripts Studies Seminar) ‘Newly acquired medieval book coffers at the Bodleian and the John Rylands Libraries’ See blogpost with downloadable foldable ‘fragments’ and links to facsimiles Kathryn James, Curator for Early Modern Books and Manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Library Sarah Wheale, Head of Rare Books at the Bodleian Libraries Matthew Shaw, Librarian of The Queen’s College, Oxford Henrike Lähnemann, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford (Oxford Seminar in the History of the Book) The Queen’s College Sammelband with Myles Coverdale’s Goostly Psalmes’, with a showing of The Queen’s College copy and the Bodleian and Beinecke Library fragments ‘Translating, Singing, Printing the Reformation. ![]() ![]() In the style of a potluck meal, each institution brings a copy or a witness to the online gathering which fills out the whole intellectual smörgåsbord. Using this technology and adapting seminar formats to online presentation, at the Bodleian Libraries Centre for the Study of the Book we have found new opportunities to participate in cross-institutional events in 2021, sharing collection material with other libraries via online platforms and learning from their expert staff and unique items. Online meeting platforms and visualizers (the modern version of that classroom standby, the overhead projector) lend themselves to the visual exploration and discussion of related items, collections, or genres of material held in institutions that are geographically distant. The lockdown period has also been an opportunity to explore what can be done in new ways and even to push beyond the usual patterns of scholarly discourse. What about special collections libraries, whose materials cannot be taken out of the institution? Temporary closures or limited access to reading rooms have meant a pivot towards more provision of digital resources, and archivists and librarians have been active in unearthing treasures to share on social media. Public and university libraries have faced the pandemic with a multitude of inventive new ways of connecting books and readers, such as ‘Grab and Go’ book deliveries limiting the time of physical visits. ![]()
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