Digitizing of Bordesholm manuscripts as part library stock at Kiel University Library

• Applicant: Dr. Kerstin Helmkamp
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; German Medieval Studies (Medieval German Literature) ; Medieval History
• Term: from 2019 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428962445

The project aims at the digitization of Bordesholm medieval manuscripts from Canons Regular monastery Saint Augustine in County Holstein. These manuscripts are part of Kiel University Library stock (UB Kiel) of Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel (CAU). The library stock at the former monastery was transferred to UB Kiel in 1665 when Kiel Uni-versity was founded. Nowadays there are 163 printings and 139 manuscripts preserved at UB Kiel. Bordesholm manuscripts cover a particularly wide range of different themes. This encourages deeply involved and most interesting academic research projects and scientific studies to take place. As a matter of fact, medieval studies and their complementary disciplines would take benefit from this library stock once broadly available.As the state of cataloging for this part of library stock has long been very poor and did not allow academic reference in a satisfactory way, it was rarely used by contemporary medieval studies for projects that covered single research questions. UB Kiel and Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB) successfully submitted an initial proposal at DFG (German Re-search Foundation) for the period 2013-2016 where they aimed at making available the Bordesholm manuscript descriptions. The goal of the research proposal was to realize high standard catalog entries and deeper indexing thus providing a basis for research on Bordesholm manuscripts. In the first 3-year project term, 70 medieval manuscripts were to be revised. UB Kiel and HAB Wolfenbüttel successfully submitted a subsequent proposal for the term 2016-2019 to the DFG that focused on deeper indexing of the remaining 69 manuscripts. Nevertheless, an important desideratum is still to be fulfilled: digitizing the Bordesholm manuscripts. The Humanities have long been on their way to increasingly rely on digital methods. This is why particularly interdisciplinary national and international research and study projects do depend on ubiquitous access to resources without any limitations in time. Digital representations most commonly need to be worked on collaboratively. For in-stance, text corpora need to be enlarged, further elaborated, annotated, transcribed. All these steps need to be checked according to the workflow software used and its technical features and legal restrictions. None of the activities mentioned before can be carried out in the case of the Bordesholm manuscripts as they may only be requested for use in the reading room at the Central Library of UB Kiel during library hours. Whereas after digitization they could be used both at any place and without any limitation in time online. Study and research projects would freely make use of them and further build upon them. Manuscript descriptions realized in the DFG-funded project would crosslink to images resulting in all resources that belong together to merge in one scheme.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)