Chapter 4 - Sacred Artefacts: Open Access, Power, Ethics, and Reciprocity

Summary

Being able to compare Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus and the newly “discovered” Khabouris Codex side by side from my home in America would have been science fiction just a few decades ago. It is such a thrill to be able to do this. It's like cheating on a cosmic scale.

Will Berry (Manuscript Enthusiast)

IF I WERE TO choose a mantra for the digital humanities, it would be “open access.” As a guiding principle, open access makes the digital transformational. It delivers digital content onto the hard drives of scholars and the public. But even when manuscripts are only viewable through high-resolution images, presenting them online radically increases their availability, as radically as the printing press once increased availability of texts. As stated in the epigraph, the rapid pace of these changes feels like science fiction, as if “cheating on a cosmic scale.” At this writing, the Vatican Library has 14,623 manuscripts online, its goal to provide online access to all of its 80,000 manuscripts. Yet this is only a mere portion of the manuscripts available. More than five hundred libraries worldwide provide online viewing of at least some of their collection. The recentness of this availability is exemplified by the St. Chad Gospels. In 2009, because neither a printed facsimile nor a full set of online images were available, I travelled to England to study the manuscript. Prior to this, I had relied on a few photographs reproduced in scholarly works and a small number of low-resolution images placed online through a British Library Turning the Pages interface. The images were inadequate. The low resolution made features of the manuscript impossible to study. Such features are critical for understanding early Christian and monastic practices in the British Isles. But they are also critical for telling the story of the artistic and scribal accomplishments that lead to the Book of Kells, generally considered the flowering of Insular art. My need for access made travelling to Lichfield Cathedral a necessity, a necessity that if not fulfilled would limit my scholarship, similar to ways lack of access has limited scholarship on manuscripts throughout the ages.