This is the last weekly report from 2023. I'll do the traditional year-end review, with a brief summary of the twenty-four manuscripts digitized at the bottom. As a note, this concludes the fifth year I have been involved in tracking the BAV digitizations. The initial work happened at the very beginning of 2018, and I took over completely in the summer of 2019

Just the Numbers

A total of 2,565 manuscripts were digitized, representing 36 different fonds, and 49 weeks of work. This works out to an average of 52.3 manuscripts a week, lower than last years 59 a week average, but higher than preceding years. This brings the total number of digitized manuscripts in the Vatican archives to 26,994¹, of which 23,085 are in full-color. These represent 82 of the 89 named fonds. Of those manuscripts, 2.460 had either an author or a title recorded, yielding an excellent "metadata hit rate" of 96%

Fond Distribution

The top four fonds, in order, were Ott.lat, Barb.lat, Vat.lat. and Pal.gr. This tracks with observed patterns, each of these collections was, for a period, the top contributor on a week-by-week basis. The top 12 fonds are graphed below².

For the smaller fonds, a table of entries will have to suffice ³

Weekly Distributions

As noted in the weekly blog posts, there are patterns to the digitization work. Week by week some collections will contribute a large number of manuscripts, and then fade away. This was quite obvious early in the year when the Swedish government donated some money to digitize Reg.lat manuscripts, leading to five weeks of work digitizing 82 manuscripts, and then basically none the rest of the year. The following graph shows these patterns visually²

Data of note

Some interesting datapoints, probably not really useful, but interesting

• Most likely the oldest manuscript digitized was Ott.lat.663, a copy of Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks, possibly as early as the late 8th C
• There are a lot of manuscripts dated to "19th C", but the latest one with a more precise date is one of the notebooks of Henry Stevenson, Jr, Vat.lat.10573, circa 1890.
• The most represented sole author of works this year was Henry Stevenson's, with 38 of his late 19th C notebooks. He's followed by 31 early 19th C volumes of inscriptions copied by Girolami Amati. ⁴
• The most popular medieval or renaissance au