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 author was John Chrysostom, unsuprising given the volume of Greek manuscripts, with 60 containing at least some of his work. 5
Weekly Review
There were twenty-four manuscripts digitized in two working days this week. The plurality, ten, were from Pal.gr, followed by six from Vat.lat. The rest were small, two each from Ott.lat and Vat.turc, and one each from Barb.gr, Barb.lat, Patetta, and Vat.pers.
At the right is a page of music, f.15v, from the Graduale/Rituale containing the Office of the Dead, Patetta.36. Despite being the third largest collection in the BAV, Patetta rarely contributes any manuscripts.
At the bottom is a line of crisp greek minuscule from f.2r of Pal.gr.86, with part of the Chronicle of Symeon Logothetes.
Notes
- The Vatican always claims to have 80,000 manuscripts in their collections, at the present rate, it will take another 21 years to digitize the entire collection.
select week(date_added) as week_added, count(*) as added_per_week,
if(fond_code in (select fond_code from
(select fond_code, count(*) as added_per_fond from
manuscripts
where year(date_added) = 2023
group by fond_code
order by added_per_fond desc
limit 12) as top_fonds),
fond_code, "Other") as other_code
from manuscripts
where year(date_added) = 2023
group by week_added, other_code;
select fond_code, count(*) as added_per_fond from
manuscripts
where year(date_added) = 2023
group by fond_code
order by added_per_fond asc
limit 24
select author, count(*) from manuscripts where
year(date_added) = 2023
group by author
year(date_added) = 2023 and author like "%Chrysostom%"
