From Evangelical Textual Criticism I learn that the excellent Juan Garcés is revolutionising things at the British Library. He’s leading a project to digitise 250 Greek manuscripts and place them online so scholars can consult the things. He has obtained funding from the Stavros Niarchos foundation.
He’s also created the Digitised Manuscripts blog to report on progress.
It seems that the British Library described the project in their “Annual Reports and Accounts 2008/2009”:
Digitisation of Greek manuscripts
We are very grateful to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation for making it possible for us to undertake a project to digitise 250 of our Greek manuscripts to make them fully accessible to researchers around the world through the internet. We will also create catalogue records for each item and create a website that will enable researchers to search using key words and interactive technology that will allow them to upload notes and collaborate with other researchers virtually. We aim to launch the website in summer 2010. We are continuing to fundraise to enable us to add the remaining Greek manuscripts and papyri to the site in the longer term.
Let us hope that they understand that we will all want downloadable PDF’s.
It might be interesting to think what mss we would like scanned. I know that New Testament people will be lobbying; but classics and patristics mss would be nice. I realise that I don’t actually know what Greek mss at the BL I would like to see.