Speaker
Description
The German Manuscript Centres have a long-standing tradition of developing standards, infrastructures, and services for the scholarly description and accessibility of medieval manuscripts. With the transition from printed catalogues to digital infrastructures such as Manuscripta Mediaevalia and, since 2023, the Handschriftenportal, digitisation has fundamentally expanded both the possibilities and responsibilities of the centres.
Against this background, the German Manuscript Centres are increasingly engaging with HTR. Their current activities focus on three main areas: establishing standards and guidelines for the creation and documentation of Ground Truth data; providing high-quality, openly accessible datasets and models for medieval scripts; and developing workflows for integrating manuscript full texts into the cross-institutional infrastructure of the Handschriftenportal and making them searchable.
Particular attention is being paid to interoperability, metadata, quality assurance, and different levels of transcription.
HTR thus represents not a replacement for traditional manuscript expertise, but an important extension of it. The Manuscript Centres increasingly see themselves as centres of expertise for the digital documentation and study of historical manuscripts, combining technological innovation with palaeographical and codicological expertise to ensure the quality, sustainability, and scholarly usability of digital resources.
At the same time, close collaboration with the research community remains essential. In particular, the collaborative creation, correction, and enrichment of full-text transcriptions can help bridge the gap between technological infrastructure and scholarly research. Such collaboration ensures that HTR workflows are not only technically robust, but also responsive to the needs, practices, and research questions of scholars.