What Is Digitalisation in Manuscript Libraries and How Do Digital Collections Work?

Digitalisation in a manuscript library means producing complete digital reproductions of physical manuscripts and publishing them online alongside scholarly descriptions, so that anyone can consult a codex without handling the original. e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, is a working example: it aims to provide free access to all medieval and a selection of modern Swiss manuscripts, and at the time of its published figures it contained 3,107 manuscripts from 100 different collections, with the library continuously updated and extended.

What digitalisation actually produces

A digitised manuscript is not just a scan. In a virtual library the reproduction is linked to a corresponding scholarly description, so the object and its metadata travel together. e-codices describes this as linking complete digital reproductions with scholarly descriptions, and its published documentation distinguishes several content layers:

• Metadata encoding – the structured record that identifies and describes the manuscript.
• Scholarly manuscript descriptions – the academic catalogue entry.
• Manuscript summaries – shorter overviews of content.
• Annotation tool – a way to add annotations to the digital object.
• Web application – the interface through which all of this is browsed and searched.

That combination is what separates a virtual manuscript library from a folder of images.

How a virtual collection is organised

Digitised manuscripts are grouped by the institution that holds the physical original, then by collection. e-codices reports manuscripts drawn from 100 different collections, and its navigation includes a Browse & Search entry point plus a Person Index, so you can approach the material by shelfmark, by collection, or by people associated with the codices.

The site also documents the rules behind what gets digitised and how: guiding principles, selection criteria, reproduction guidelines, conservation guidelines, data security, and multilingualism. These are the policy layer that makes a digital collection coherent rather than arbitrary.

Why free access matters

The stated goal is free access to Switzerland's medieval manuscripts and a selection of modern ones. Practically, that means a researcher, student, or curious reader can examine a complete reproduction and its scholarly description without travelling to the holding library or requesting physical consultation. Conservation guidelines exist precisely because the original should be handled as little as possible once a faithful digital surrogate is available.

Using e-codices as an example

If you want to see how digitalisation works in practice, the workflow is straightforward:

1. Open the e-codices site and choose Browse & Search.
2. Narrow by collection or institution — for example, material from the Abbey Library of St. Gall.
3. Open a manuscript record to view the digital reproduction together with its scholarly description.
4. Use the Person Index or Annotations if you are tracing names or marginalia rather than shelfmarks.

The interface is available in de, en, fr, it, so the same collection can be consulted in four languages.

The institutional side

A virtual library is not run by one library alone. e-codices lists a Curatorium, CeCH, partners, scholarly cooperations, manuscript portals, and Swiss manuscript collections among its institutions, with a service provider (text & bytes LLC) handling the technical side. Rights, terms of use, and a privacy policy govern what you may do with the reproductions. If you plan to reuse images, check the Terms of Use rather than assuming the material is unrestricted.

What to take away

Digitalisation turns a physical codex into a reproducible, linkable, searchable object; a virtual manuscript library adds the scholarly apparatus, the selection and conservation rules, and the institutional agreements that make the result trustworthy. e-codices shows the model at scale — thousands of codices, a hundred collections, four interface languages, and free access as the declared goal.