LECTURE: Medieval Manuscripts Seminar, Hanno Wijsman (Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, IRHT-CNRS), Paris, Bibale, a Database for Researching Historic Collections and Manuscript Provenance, and other Digital Tools developed at the Institut de recherché et d’histoire des textes (IRHT), Senate House Library, 4th Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1, 3 February 2015, 17:30 – 19:00.
The aim of this presentation is twofold. In the first place I will present the history, structure, scope, and ambitions of the Bibale database an electronic tool that makes available data on medieval and early modern collections and on the transmission of medieval manuscripts. This tool has been developed at the Section de codicologie, histoire des bibliothèques et héraldique of the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (IRHT-CNRS) in Paris and was made available online in a first form in May 2014.
Secondly I will present its context of other digital tools concerning medieval manuscripts closely linked to it: other IRHT databases (Medium, Jonas, Initiale, Pinakes, Bibliothèque virtuelle des manuscrits médiévaux) as well as the Biblissima project (Bibliotheca bibliothecarum novissima: an observatory for the written cultural heritage of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance), financed by the French government program Équipements d’excellence. The various databases will be directly shown online with examples of queries and possibilities.