Welcome to Digital Scriptorium!

Digital Scriptorium (DS) is a growing consortium of North American institutions with collections of global premodern manuscripts. DS is dedicated to building an online national union catalog for manuscripts in US collections. 

The beta version of the new DS Catalog was launched in July 2023. We are in the process of gathering the most up-to-date data from member institutions, which will be enriched and transformed as Linked Open Data.

The addition of current DS Member Institution data has begun and will continue through 2024. Recent data additions to the DS Catalog include contributions from:

We are currently processing records from Harvard University, the Huntington, University of California, Davis, and University of Missouri, Columbia.

More member institutions will be represented in the DS Catalog soon, dependent upon contribution of their data to DS in the coming weeks and months. If records for a member institution are not yet available, please check back or follow our progress by subscribing to the DS newsletter.

Use the DS Catalog to

  • Access and research manuscript data across member institutions
  • Bookmark results and save searches
  • Link to external authorities for richer context and deeper data exploration
  • Query the DS Wikibase SPARQL Endpoint for advanced search and discovery within the DS Catalog and beyond

Questions about the new DS Catalog?

Learn more about the project here.

Is your institution interested in joining DS?

Learn more about membership here.

Member benefits include:
  • Transformation of your structured manuscript metadata into Linked Open Data
  • Representation of your manuscript collections in Wikidata, the world’s largest and freely accessible Knowledge Graph (coming soon)
  • Participation in a national community of scholarship and research supporting the study of our shared intellectual heritage through collaboration across institutional and regional boundaries

Stay up to date on DS community activities and opportunities.

Sign up here for the DS newsletter.

Donate to Digital Scriptorium

Your tax-deductible contribution today supports tomorrow’s sustainability of DS’s national union catalog of pre- and early modern manuscripts and ensures open access to member institutions’ data by users around the world.

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