From Parchment to the Network: Manuscripts Management and Cataloguing

Conservation libraries, which hold manuscripts and are willing to provide catalogues, face the problem of their diversity: each manuscript, document or archive has its own features, due to its history. Information technology helps librarians both to record ancient documents descriptions, dealing with highly non-standard data, and to allow their dissemination. Biblioteca Ambrosiana collaborates with DSI of the Universita degli Studi di Milano to find solutions to a variety of problems related to management, catalogue and description of these documents. In this paper we present some results: a topographical inventory and a filter to interface and make comoatible archives of manuscript documents in Manus, a relational DB distributed in Italy, and XML descriptions, adopting the DTD for manuscripts defined by the EU Project MASTER.