With only three working days before the Christmas break, the Vatican still managed to add twenty-eight manuscripts this week. These include another Vietnamese volume in Borg.tonch, many more Urg.gr volumes and an assortment of Vat.lat codices. To the right is f.3r from Vat.lat.12017, the fourth of a four-volume set from circa 1576 related to the Archbishop of S. Severinae, as far as I can tell. The page is an excellent example of acidic ink and extremely cursive handwriting combining to make an illegible page.

The bottom border is from f.1r of Urb.gr.103, a collection of the Orations of Demosthenes.

Although manuscripts were still being added this week, we will begin our end-of-year wrapup with some numbers. In 2020 a total of 1,822 manuscripts were digitized by the Vatican, spread across 32 fonds (these counts exclude two entries in the Borg.mess fond that were erroniously uploaded and then deleted), 220 of those were microfilm scans upgraded to full color. This brings to 20,330 the total number of manuscripts available online, of which 4,874 are still the low-quality microfilm scans. Here is the breakdown by fond of the manuscripts added this year. The "Other" category includes the 23 fonds with fewer than 10 manuscipts.

The number of manuscripts added per week seems to show little pattern across the years. Clearly 2020 has some large lacunae in the spring and early summer, weeks 11-18, but otherwise there's no obvious "scanning season" recognizable from the data.

Notes

• All charts use the Google Chart API with code pre-generated from Google Chart Generator