Digitisation and cataloging of the paper manuscripts of the Heilsbronn and St. Jobst monastery libraries

• Applicant: Konstanze Söllner
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 512634045

In the third project, which is scheduled to last 34 months, the 219 paper and 3 parchment manuscript volumes of the Heilsbronn and St. Jobst monastery libraries are to be indexed bibliographically and in terms of content and structure, and digitised in accordance with the respective conservation requirements and in accordance with the DFG's rules of practice, using high-resolution camera-based scanning systems in the rooms of the university library and with its own staff. Heilsbronn is a rare case of a still almost completely preserved monastery library, which shaped intellectual life in the Franconian region for centuries and, after secularisation, still served as a princely school for the junior civil servants of the Hohenzollern margraviate of Bayreuth and Ansbach. The collection comprises 418 medieval parchment and 176 paper manuscripts. The library of the Franciscan monastery of St. Jobst, which existed only from 1514 to 1529, contains 57 medieval manuscripts. The works intended for the project include Bible commentaries, liturgica, theological-philosophical manuscripts, commentaries on Aristotle, writings on scholasticism and post-scholasticism, sermons and writings on homiletics, canon law and secular law, ancient classics and humanists, works on grammar and rhetoric, mysticism and scholasticism, as well as legends of the saints and scientific manuscripts. Until the end of the project, the digitised titles will be listed both in the central manuscript portal and via the Bavarian Union Catalogue with the Gateway Bayern portal and in the local catalogue of the University Library of Erlangen-Nürnberg, as well as visualised in the DFG Viewer via the OAI interface and listed in the DDB and Europeana. The descriptions available in older catalogues are checked for each individual manuscript and revised on the basis of the available research documentation. This information, updated in the inventory procedure and taking into account the DFG guidelines on manuscript cataloguing, forms the basis for the short catalogue records to be created in the library catalogues and is also made available for subsequent use by scholars via OAI interfaces in the standardised formats MARCxml, METS/TEI as well as IIIF.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Jutta Faust