Manuscriptorium Digital-Edition Environment: The Present State, Prospects, and Challenges

Michael Lužný, Manuscriptorium Department, National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague

Chief aim of the proposed paper is to present how digital editions are created, aggregated and curated in the Manuscriptorium Digital Library. This year Manuscriptorium enters a new phase in its long-term development, gradually transforming a “mere” digital library of written cultural heritage into a virtual research environment for both the interested public and scholars from various fields (see https://beta.manuscriptorium.com/). An inherent part of the new Manuscriptorium will be a digital-edition module – the launch of its first version being planned for this autumn. The editions, encoded in XML format based on the TEI standard, have been in preparation for several years already, and come into being in a diverse manner. The main focus, however, is on processing and aggregation of older editions, no longer protected by copyright. These can be enhanced and enriched by other features, even revised. With digitised manuscripts containing the texts correlated with the editions, their visualisation has the potential to exceed by far the original book editions; nevertheless, further manuscripts that did not serve as a basis for these editions can be correlated as well, thus presenting other textual witnesses preserved, without necessarily having to re-edit the texts. Furthermore, various referencing markup (place names, personal names, etc.), for example, can be applied to certain texts, creating another additional layer to the original editions. At the end of the presentation a closer look will be taken at the example of processing lesser-known editions of Czech Reformation tracts by Jan Sedlák (e.g. Táborské traktáty eucharistické, Brno 1918), which will demonstrate the above-mentioned principles of digital-edition aggregation in Manuscriptorium.