This user guide is intended to help you get started using the tabular versions of the Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries catalogue data, and to give you examples of what you can do with the data.
This guide consists of the following sections:
Before you get started, please read the following notes on the limitations on the quality and completeness of the data.
The Bodleian’s Western medieval manuscript catalogues, for which this processor is primarily designed, remains a work in progress both in the encoding into TEI-XML of data which have already been recorded, and in the recording of new data. The absence of information regarding e.g. decoration or musical notation should therefore not be taken as an indication that no such features exist for a given manuscript, only that these data have not been recorded in the digital catalogues.
Similarly, many of the datapoints presented through the outputs of this processor are the work of previous generations of librarians and scholars who had cataloguing priorities and practices that are different to those of modern cataloguers. In particular, in previous cataloguing cycles, measurements have often been rounded to the nearest 5mm or quarter/eighth of an inch, and features such as decoration have been described using assessments of aesthetic and material quality (e.g. “Good border”), rather than through dispassionate descriptions of their form and contents.
Users should therefore be aware of these limitations when engaging with the outputs of this processor, whether using the default outputs or custom ones.
To download the files, click on the links below:
| Collections Data (Manuscripts) | Authority Data (Organisations, People, Places, and Works) |
|---|---|
| XLSX (Excel) | XLSX (Excel) |
| CSV | CSV |
| JSON | JSON |
Click here to access the repository on GitHub, where you can download it in full.