Peter Robinson of the Virtual Manuscripts Room at Birmingham has responded here to a post of mine, bewailing the emphasis on Islamic manuscripts so far, with a very interesting response:
We are aware that the only way to satisfy everyone is, simply, to digitize everything. The project was by way of an experiment, to learn about the issues involved in the digitization and to satisfy ourselves that it WOULD be possible to go on and digitize the entire collection.
Now, we believe we can do that. We have developed a plan for this, and it would be very helpful to have the support of people on this list.
One way you could do this would be to go send in any mss from Mingana that you would like to see digitized using the form at http://vmr.bham.ac.uk/contact/. The more such requests we gather, the stronger our case for digitizing the whole collection.
This is a very open-minded and sensible approach, and I would encourage people to do just this.
The catalogues are all online here. I know that it is summer, and we all have many things to do involving strawberries, but if you can tear yourself away, mull over what texts you would like to see online. I can think of the manuscript including Cyrus and Thomas of Edessa, without blinking, for instance; and there will be more!
Many thanks to all the people who have sent in to the VMR lists of recommendations for Mingana manuscripts they would like to see digitized! This is really helpful. Keep the requests rolling in.
We’d be interested, too, in any other comments on the site. We plan, fairly soon, to set up an ‘annotation’ feature, so scholars can add notes on individual pages/ whole manuscripts.
Good to know that feedback is happening! Of course it is summer — even I am on holiday — and things should pick up in September as people get back. Might be worth putting out a push for feedback then.
Annotation is good. There ought to be a feature whereby one can enter a “table of contents” for a manuscript (transcribed from the catalogue) with links to the start of each section. Certainly I would tend to do that on any ms. I was working on, and I doubt I am alone in that.