No new manuscripts this week because of Christmas, so this is a chance to do some end-of-the-year accounting. First the top-line number, there were 2373* manuscripts digitized and added to the Vatican website in 2019, up from 1935** in 2018. Both of these numbers have caveats, however: in 2018, I only started tracking additions at the end of January, so we are missing approximately three weeks of data(**). In 2019, a bug in the tracking code, specifically it was not querying the page for fond Arch.Cap.S.Pietro, meaning that the yearly total above is probably correct, but the monthly/weekly data will NOT include the 470 manuscripts there. They were added en-masse in the two vacation weeks of August, which would distort the monthly or weekly totals. The graph below gives a week-by-week comparison of the two years, with the exception of the mid-August and Christmas/New Years vacations, there seems to be no large-scale pattern, but...

A breakdown by fond may not be as useful, but was interesting to me none the less. Unsurpsisingly more than 50% of the manuscripts are from Vat.lat, there are more than 15,000 manuscripts in that collection and only perhaps 1/3 have been digitized. They from seem to be working roughly in sequence, the year started in the middle of the 4,000s and by December we were deep into the 6,000s(6,815 was the last one). Ross has also been strongly represented, with at least some each week, the others in the top came in bunches, with Arc.Cap.S.Pietro being a bit of a wildcard.

Of the manusctipts, just under half, 1078, were datable to at least a range. The earliest is a 5th Century fragment of the writings of St. Cyprian from Bobbio, Vat.lat.10959 and the latest is a presentation manuscript for Pope Piux XI commemorating his trip to South America, dated to 1929, Vat.lat.15345.

Finally a review of the coding for the year. I moved the codebase to GitHub in July and since then there have been 108 commits to the repo. The big code improvements have been:

• Foundation 6 based layout
• Thumbnails, stored locally, and basic mobile functionality on the weekly pages
• Better headers/summaries for the year pages
• Additional side databases to help auto-identification of manuscripts
• Better "Human" sorting to handle shelfmarks with embedded numbers
• Google-based search for the updates

2019 GitHub Commits