Towards the Project of an Open Catalogue of Manuscripts

Abstract:  After an introduction and a short description of the research methods usually adopted in scientific disciplines and particularly in palaeography, some hypotheses on the influence of new technologies on human learning and some examples of the use of Web technologies in manuscript cataloguing are proposed. The reasons for the project of an information system adopting Web technologies for manuscripts cataloguing are then reported and the meaning of an open catalogue strictly related to the above information system is presented. The project is applied to a concrete example to show one of the possible ways the information system can be used by the palaeographers' community and, more in general, by scientific community. The paper ends with the proposal of long term publishing hypotheses for materials collected within the database of the open catalogue.