The Wellcome Library in London has recently announced that over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available through Wellcome Images: http://wellcomeimages.org
 

“Drawn from our vast historical holdings, the images are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.

This means that they can be used for commercial or personal purposes, with an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London). All of the images from our historical collections can be used free of charge.

The images can be downloaded in high-resolution directly from the Wellcome Images website for users to freely copy, distribute, edit, manipulate, and build upon as you wish, for personal or commercial use. The images range from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Francisco Goya.”

For more on this announcement, please visit: http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2014/01/thousands-of-years-of-visual-culture-made-free-through-wellcome-images

A new website Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Maps (DMMmaps), a “roadmap” to thousands of digitized medieval books, has been launched:

From the creators:

“There is something genuinely thrilling in browsing the maps, clicking on a semi-unknown digitized library, looking at a random manuscript, and suddenly discovering a miniature, a detail, and illumination that no one has looked at for years and sharing it with your followers. We want to make to make as many people as possible experience this thrill; and that’s why we created the DMMmaps.

These maps were designed to help scholars and enthusiasts explore and discover digitized medieval manuscripts made available all over the world.”

For more information, please visit DMMmaps website: http://digitizedmedievalmanuscripts.org

The British Library is following Getty Museum’s lead in releasing images into the public domain.

The British Library has released 1 million images onto Flickr Commons (view the album here) for “anyone to use, remix, and repurpose,” while the Getty Museum released 4,600 images back in August.

The images shared by the British Library come from 17th, 18th and 19th century books.

The Guggenheim had made 99 art catalogues available for free online, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a whopping 375 free art books and catalogues overall.

For more information, please visit this link: http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/free-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art-and-the-guggenheim-offer-474-free-art-catalogues-online.html

Those members who have Apple or Android devices may be interested in a newly released app that is designed to help you with your medieval palaeography.

The origins of this app lie in online exercises in palaeography developed for postgraduate students in the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, U.K. The aim is to provide practice in the transcription of a wide range of medieval hands, from the twelfth to the late fifteenth century.

Apple users: https://itunes.apple.com/app/medieval-handwriting/id734335308
Android Users: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.agbooth.handwriting.medieval

The first stage of the open access project “The Copenhagen Chansonnier and the ‘Loire Valley’ chansonniers” is now completed and can be accessed at:

http://chansonniers.pwch.dk

The web site contains new editions of all the polyphonic songs in the French 15th century chansonnier in The Royal Library, Copenhagen, MS Thott 291 8° (the so-called Copenhagen chansonnier). Each song is here edited as a ‘performance on paper’ according to the manuscript, and all the concordances in the related ‘Loire Valley’ chansonniers are edited in a similar way. Each song is accompanied by a list of sources, an edition of the poem(s), incl. English translation, links to online facsimile editions, and extensive comments on sources, texts and music. The site further contains detailed descriptions of the five chansonniers and proposes hypotheses concerning their genesis and dating; the latter is summarized in the introduction, which also discusses the principles of the edition.

Furthermore, the site offers supplementary materials, which serve to support the investigation of the repertory. They comprise articles and editions concerning the composers Gilles Mureau (complete works), Philippe Basiron (complete chansons) and Fede alias Jean Sohier, about the French music manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Ms. 2794, about chansons notated in ‘clefless notation’, etc.

DigiPal is a new resource for the study of medieval handwriting, particularly that produced in England during the years 1000–1100, the time of Æthelred, Cnut and William the Conqueror. It currently has:

• 1678 Manuscript and Charters
• 31817 Features
• 31817 Graphs
• 8568 Idiographs
• 1422 Scribal Hands. 

Funded by the EU FP7, it is based at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London.

For further information, visit the DigiPal website: http://www.digipal.eu

Trinity College, Cambridge is digitizing its medieval manuscripts, and making them freely available on the Web. A few years ago, M.R.James’s catalogue of the manuscripts was put up on the Library’s website, with some updates. This is now being used as the index tool for searching for digitized volumes. So far, about 150 of the thousand or so manuscripts have been copied, in a programme that is part-funded by the College’s alumni.

For access, go to the Library’s website http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=9

Click on ‘Early manuscripts’, and then ‘The James catalogue’. From there follow the links to the manuscript you wish to see. The descriptions of those manuscripts that have been digitized are headed with access to the relevant images. Priority is being given to manuscripts that are most in demand. The Librarian (Professor David McKitterick) will be glad to receive suggestions for further manuscripts that might be treated early in the programme.

Thanks to the MEMC for passing on this resource.

The following news will be of interest to scholars who are looking for freely accessible medieval and early modern images.

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles has made available, without charge, all available digital images to which the Getty holds the rights or that are in the public domain to be used for any purpose. No permission is required.

Initially, the images available through the Open Content Program are of works in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collections. Over time, images from the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute will be added.

For full details, visit: http://www.getty.edu/about/opencontent.html

The British Library has released a master list of all of the manuscripts from their Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts collections that have been uploaded, including hyperlinks to the digitised versions.

You can download an Excel version of the file here:

For more information about this master list, visit the British Library’s medieval manuscripts blog: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/07/fancy-a-giant-list-of-digitised-manuscript-hyperlinks.html.