While the Vatican continues scanning manuscripts, with eleven added this week, I'm continuinig the look back at 2020 with code updates. First a list of the major feature updates

• Created a set of Next/Previous links at the bottom of each page using a seperate weekly_notes_previous table. Later work optimized the design by removing the weekly_notes_previous table, replacing it with an extra column on weekly_notes that has a loop foreign key
• Added in a table from Henry Marriott Bannister's Monumenti vaticani di paleografia musicale latina, available online at the University of Heidelberg Historic Literature. There is stiill some manual cleanup needed when these entries are linked, backlog exists
• Updated the nightly download_vatican_listings.pl script to track the shelfmarks of added manuscripts. Will be useful in the future
• Added an ignore column to the manuscripts table to handle tracking MS which have been added, and then removed from the repository.
• Updated the DB and page generartion scripts to use UTF8mb4 encoding. This does not work 100% perfectly, but helps with the Chinese characters often found in Borg.tonch manuscripts
• Auto-linking added for Greek manuscripts in Pinakes and Latin manuscripts catalogued at Heidelberg for the Pal.lat fond.
• There were plenty of small improvements to the layout code.

The big improvement was the Ad Hoc pages. This entails a single table which contains a fragment of SQL to select manuscripts, a title and header and footer info. These are then rendered into listing pages. Because the SQL is freeform, one can query by almost any attribute. Pages have been made for manuscripts with shelfmark 1, manuscripts relating to Pierluigi Galletti, and several fonds.

Commits to Github During 2020

Of the manuscripts added this week, Vat.lat.8559 is a nice Humanist book containing letters of St. Jerome. Although it is sadly quite worn, the title page still has a large miniature of the Saint, vinework borders over gold and brightly colored epigraphic titles. In the letter C to start the first letter you can see Jerome at work, surrounded by books and his pet lion, f.1r to the right.

At the bottom is a fragment of f.105r from Urb.gr.77, a collection of works on harmonics. This page begins Porphyry's Harmonics, a commentary to the earlier work by Ptolemy.