National Library Finishes Manuscript Digitisation
Twelve thousand items are now searchable, though translation lags well behind scanning.
The national library completed a seven-year project to digitise its manuscript collection, putting roughly twelve thousand items online at resolutions high enough for scholarly work.
The scanning was the straightforward part. Cataloguing was not: many items had only brief nineteenth-century descriptions, and a substantial minority were catalogued under titles that turned out to be wrong. Librarians re-described about a fifth of the collection during the project.
Translation remains the gap. Most items are searchable only by their original language, which limits access for researchers who cannot read it. The library said translation of finding aids is the next phase, without giving a timeline.