A short introduction to the Manuscriptorium services. Contains general infromation on the Manuscriptorium purpose, the summary of aggregated contents, basic end-user features description and summary of ways of cooperation with content providers.
Manuscriptorium: a gentle introduction. (PDF, 3 MB)
Historical writings of one of the most important scientists of all time, Sir Isaac Newton, has gone online at the British Royal Society. The biography by William Stukeley is one of several original documents that are being presented on the “Turning the Pages” website.
Newton (January 4th 1643 – March 31st 1727) was a physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, and alchemist. He built the first practical telescope and is credited with discovering gravity. He is also credited, along with Gottfried Leibniz, for formulating differential and derivative calculus.
Internet surfers use their mouse to turn the pages of these original documents. Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society, said “Stukeley’s biography is a precious artefact for historians of science.”
The manuscript describes Stukeley’s rendition of how Newton discovered gravity. “He told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood,” Stukeley wrote.
Newton wondered why the Apple always fell to the ground, something we all take for granted today.
“Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself. Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the earth’s centre? Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter.”
By: Sam Lee
The Purpose of this page at the present stage of development is to test certain procedures of access and control. In addition to this, it is to provide non-registred user with a preview of the basic functions of the European Manuscript Server Initiative.
The Cataloguing of Western Medieval Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library: a TEI approachwith an appendix describing a TEI-conformant manuscript description.
There are three main series of published catalogues of the western manuscripts at the Bodleian Library: the so-called `Quarto' catalogues, published between 1845 and 1900, in quarto format, which cover the major collections acquired (for the most part) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Coxe 1845-1900); the Summary Catalogue , published between 1895 and 1953, which covers the manuscripts acquired from 1602 to 1915, except those already described in the Quarto catalogues (Madan 1895-1953); and the Summary Catalogue of Post-Medieval Western Manuscripts , published in 1991, which covers most post-medieval manuscripts acquired between 1916 and 1975 (Clapinson and Rogers 1991). In January 1996 the Library began a four-year project, funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), under the Non-Formula Funding Specialised Research Collections initiative, the purpose of which is to make available descriptions of the medieval western manuscripts acquired by the Library since 1916, for which no full published catalogue yet exists. For more detailed bibliographical information on the catalogues of western manuscripts at the Bodleian, see http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/guides/wmss/wmss02.htm.
The Duke Papyrus Archive provides electronic access to texts about and images of nearly 1400 papyri from ancient Egypt. The target audience includes: papyrologists, ancient historians, archaeologists, biblical scholars, classicists, Coptologists, Egyptologists, students of literature and religion and all others interested in ancient Egypt. The project of conserving, interpreting, cataloguing and imaging the largely unpublished Duke papyrus collection was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities , and is part of the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) Project. Project staff at Duke have included Steven L. Hensen, John F. Oates, Peter van Minnen, Suzanne D. Corr, Paolo Mangiafico, Joshua Sosin, and John Bauschatz.
The database DMD is part of the research project The Relation of Practical Experience and Conceptual Structures in the Emergence of Science: Mental Models in the History of Mechanics, a project pursued by Department I of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin, headed by Jürgen Renn. In its context, a large number of original sources concerning the history of mechanics have been made available on the Internet as a digital research library, the Archimedes Project. In this broader context the database DMD is especially devoted to studying the practical knowledge of early modern engineers.