Renewing Medieval Libraries of Great Britain as a collaborative and sustainable dataset

Journal article

Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, an effort to trace the institutional ownership of printed and manuscript volumes, is one of book history’s longest-running collaborative enterprises. It originated as the analogue equivalent of what current terminology would label a crowdsourced open dataset: a public card index at the Bodleian Library, published through printed handlists and later an experimental digital database. This report sets out the rationale, methods, and early results of the current renewal of Medieval Libraries as a sustainable digital resource. Supported by the British Academy, the project completes the conversion of the original index cards, printed volumes, and later digital records into a unified catalogue following the conventions of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), embedded within the Bodleian’s special collections infrastructure. It repositions the dataset as a record of individual books rather than as an index of provenance evidence. The project is both a historical archive of scholarly judgment and a living resource for manuscript studies whose success relies on readers’ contributions.

Authors: Dunning, ANJ; Witherden, S

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Journal: Manuscript Studies
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 2
• Publication date: 2026-09-01
• Acceptance date: 2026-04-01
• EISSN: 2380-1190
• ISSN: 2381-5329
• Language: English