Mapping Manuscript Migrations: new portal launched

he Mapping Manuscript Migrations portal was publicly launched on 30 January 2020 at the Digging into Data Conference at the National Science Foundation in Washington DC.

The MMM portal enables users to track hundreds of thousands of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts by origin, owner, author, and title. Users can also visualize their journeys over the centuries from production to last known location.

MMM uses Linked Open Data principles and technology to combine data from three important manuscript databases:
• Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts
• Bibale
• Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries

The portal is the product of two and a half years’ work by the MMM project team, working across four partner institutions: the University of Oxford (Oxford e-Research Centre and Bodleian Libraries), the University of Pennsylvania (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies), the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (IRHT-CNRS), and Aalto University (Semantic Computing Research Group).

The MMM project has been funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform under Round 4 of its Digging into Data Challenge (2017-2020). The national funding agencies contributing to the project are the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US), the Agence nationale de la recherche (France), and the Academy of Finland.

Project coordinator Dr Toby Burrows (Oxford e-Research Centre) said: “The initial feedback from researchers and the wider community has been very positive. I’m confident that we have created something that will make a significant difference to manuscript research in the future.”