Yesterday we showed you how the Utrecht Library is brilliantly promoting a manuscript of great importance in the Netherlands. Today we are bringing your attention to how Switzerland is skillfully managing the digitization of all its collections on e-codices.
You are probably aware of e-codices already:
e-codices offers free online access to medieval and early modern manuscripts from public and church-owned collections as well as from numerous private collections.
It currently allows access to 1189 digitized manuscripts (many more being added soon!) and it has always had a pleasing interface to go with it.
The new e-codices interface, with Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 3The new e-codices
Recently e-codices has updated this interface with what we believe to be even a better one: a clean page with all the information one would wish from a digitized manuscript (TEI-P5 metadata), along with a large preview image of the book, is presented to the user; all on a responsive design that adapts to tablets, phones and desktop monitors.
There is a new viewer based on OpenSeadragon and SharedCanvas is being used to unite dispersed manuscripts.
A new side bar is also in place, which can be shown or hidden, and it displays the metadata and basic information about each manuscript.
To finish up: Search has been improved even further, and there have been improvements also on the back-end of things.
An example of the exquisite details you can explore, thanks to the great quality of the digitized manuscripts on e-codices. (St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek / Cod. Sang. 53)I can’t but urge you all to go and visit (and enjoy) this beautiful site. It is done with a lot of love and passion, and it really shines through
You can obviously access all the libraries from e-codices via the DMMapp.
Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, Ms. Rh. 167