Lynn Ransom: Creating a universal finding aid for world manuscripts: Possibilities, pitfalls, and potential

“It would be a great but by no means superlative task to make a complete finding list of all extant manuscripts in volume form up to the year 1500, at least in European languages, and it will most likely be done before many years have passed. If done, it may be expected from our experience that thousands of lost works will be automatically discovered or rediscovered, centuries of the time of historical scholars and textual critics saved, myriads of historical mistakes spared, other myriads of futile books prevented, and in general a final saving made to human civilization of thousands of times the cost of the work."

In 1909, the American scholar-librarian Ernest Cushing Richardson spoke these words to the members of the Bibliographical Society of America. Richardson believed that the majority of the world’s literary, religious, philosophical, and scientific heritage lay hidden from researchers because there was no census of world manuscripts to which researchers had recourse and that potentially a wealth of human knowledge remained untapped due to a simple inaccessibility of information. By 1933, Richardson devised a methodology for what he called his “Union World Catalog of Manuscript Books.” His aims were simple: to make the briefest of descriptive entries for each manuscript in every institution. Unfortunately, the logistics of a global project on this scale proved to be an insurmountable stumbling block in the early decades of the 20th century. After an ambitious beginning and two experiments in his methodology completed, Richardson was forced to admit defeat, and his project fell into obscurity.

In spite of its failure to materialize, Richardson’s vision of a simple accounting of the world’s manuscripts that would transform humanities scholarship has relevance today in the study, care, and conservation of the world’s manuscripts. Indeed, current advances in information technology make it possible not only to reconsider Richardson’s vision but also to move forward in its implementation. The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (SDBM) at the University of Pennsylvania is in a unique position to jump start such a project. The SDBM contains nearly 180,000 manuscript records, representing approximately 90,000 manuscripts produced before 1600. Our records are drawn from over 12,000 auction and sales catalogues, inventories, catalogues from institutional and private collections, and other sources that document sales and locations of manuscript books. In its current form, the SDBM assists researchers in locating and identifying manuscripts from Europe, Asia, and Africa produced before 1600, establishing provenance, and aggregating descriptive information about specific classes or types of manuscripts. Following Richardson’s lead, however, we are embarking on a transformation of the SDBM into a universal finding aid for the world’s manuscripts. Our idea is to create an online, user-driven, collaborative tool for creating a universal finding list of the world’s manuscripts. It will allow the ingestion of data from institutions and allow individuals to contribute as a by-product of their own research without needing special software or training.

This paper will address not only how such a tool might work but more significantly how such a tool would contribute to the study, care, and conservation of the world’s manuscripts. In short, a universal finding aid maintained by its user community would make it possible to track current and historic locations of manuscripts to facilitate manuscript research on an international scale. It would also make it possible to inventory collections at little or no cost. The need for such inventories is especially acute in the Near, Middle, and Far East, where there exist numerous uncatalogued manuscript collections that are vulnerable to theft and destruction. The paper will also explore the challenges inherent in a project on this scale but will propose ways in which these challenges could be overcome in the context of community-based manuscript research.