At the Spring CNI meeting a few days ago in Minneapolis, David Rosenthal gave an absolutely extraordinary plenary talk on digital preservation. For everybody at the talk who wanted additional details, and for all those who couldn’t be at the talk, David has provided an extended version of his argument (as well as pointers to his slides) on his blog site at:

The wide cornucopia of digitized medieval manuscripts is a real boon to historians, art historians, and those with a penchant for such documents.
However, it can be taxing to sort through a wide range of sites to narrow in on the documents of primary interest, but that process just got much easier via the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts. The idea for the Catalogue was first mentioned in a talk at the MLA conference by Christopher Baswell in 2005, and it became a possibility as a result of support from the Center for Medieval Renaissance Studies at UCLA. The Catalogue provides interested parties with a centralized database of links to various medieval manuscripts online. Currently, visitors can either perform a detailed search across the database or browse around the collection by location, author, title, language, or repository. The database contains links to over 1000 manuscripts and more are being added on a regular basis

source: Scout report

The Research Information Network report Discovering objects: Meeting researchers’ needs investigates how researchers discover and gain access to physical objects and artefacts using four varied subject disciplines as examples of the process: archaeology, art history, earth sciences, and social and economic history.

Many museums face increasing difficulties in providing the levels of support for research and scholarship that some of them did in the past. But the report shows that there is great scope for developing collaboration between museums, galleries and the research community, which would bring benefits to both.

The report finds that researchers want access to online finding aids to enable them to plan their visits to museums and collections, so that they can both see and handle the objects, and that contact with curatorial staff is of critical importance. The evidence gathered shows that most researchers are unaware of the online catalogues that currently exist or are being developed and feel that that there is a lack of consistency and transparency in the arrangements that museums make for researchers’ direct access to objects. However, their most important wish is that online access to museum databases to be provided as quickly as possible, even if the records are imperfect or incomplete.