Catalogues & Collections

Here we list mostly collections of digitised manuscripts and/or early-printed books, and also some digital catalogues.

The University Library in Ljubljana provides descriptions and facsimiles of the thirty-four manuscripts in the collection of Jernej Kopitar (1780-1844). We also have a handlist of 16th-century cyrillic printed books, many also from Kopitar’s collection, in the library, prepared by Ines Jerele.

A large amount of glagolitic material from various sources, including digital copies of manuscripts and printed books from Clozianus to the 1896 printed Missal, is collected on the Glagoljica site, which also includes modern scholarship on this subject and other resources.

There are also pages devoted to cyrillic and glagolitic in Croatia by Darko Žubrinić, which include biblographical information (from 1975) and links to facsimiles of Croatian glagolitic books, manuscript and printed.

The National Library of Serbia has made available digital images from some of its manuscripts and early-printed books. The manuscripts are, unfortunately, not digitised in their entirety: only a few images are given for each item. Similar partial digitisations of a much greater amount manuscript and printed material (up to the end of the eighteenth century) from institutions all over Serbia are to be found in the Регистар старе и ретке библиотечке грађе од изузетног значаја. Much more useful are the digital versions of the 157 manuscripts belonging to Visoki Dečani, which are complete.

A small body of mediæval Serbian legal texts in facsimile and transcription is among the resources provided by the Monumenta Serbica site.

The “Archæographic” section of the Digital Library of Macedonia at present contains predominantly nineteenth-century printed material and no Slavonic manuscripts, but we may infer that material is intended to be added in future.

The Digital Library of the National Library of Bulgaria includes a large selection of manuscripts, especially those of interest for their ornamentation.

The Holy Trinity St Sergius Lavra provides descriptions and facsimiles of its manuscript collection, and of an ever-increasing number of other collections in the Russian State Library, together with the Library’s collection of early-printed books, some archival materials, and a few catalogues. This site does not list all The Russian State Library’s digital holdings, more of which can be accessed through the library’s own digital catalogues. (To find a specific manuscript, go to расширенный поиск and enter the shelfmark, in the form "Ф.247 №1", for example, where it says "введите идентификатор документа". Do not fill in any of the other fields.)

The Historical Museum in Moscow provides summary descriptions of several thousand manuscripts and early-printed books. Unfortunately most of them are accompanied by only one or two images, but a few have links to complete digitisations.

The Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (РГАДА) has provided a substantial amount of manuscript books and archival materials in digital form.

The National Library of Russia in St Petersburg has digitised and made available its collection of Serbian manuscripts, understood broadly to include Bosnian manuscripts and also manuscripts which are only partly Serbian in origin. Other digitised manuscripts can be found through the electronic catalogue of the Department of Manuscripts. The digital holdings of the library may also be searched under Рукописные материалы and under Редкая книга.

The Library of the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg has made available digital descriptions and facsimiles of a number of its manuscripts.

Цифровая библиотека "Книжные памятники Сибири" includes digital images of manuscripts (including the collection of M.N.Tichomirov), five books printed by Ivan Fedorov, and also some Old Believer and modern material.

The Novgorod Birch-Bark Letters are available in reproduction and transcription, with a small amount of secondary literature about them.

The Izbornyk site is mostly concerned with Ukrainian history, but includes some facsimiles of early-printed books (under the heading Граматики та лексикони) and literature about them.

The National Library of Ukraine has provided digital facsimiles of Cyrillic manuscripts and early-printed books, including the Kiev Missal and books printed by Schweipolt Fiol, Francysk Skaryna and Ivan Fedorov. The ordering of the lists is sometimes rather unexpected.

The Medievalia project provides digitised copies of 75 manuscripts in the Library of the Romanian Academy of Sciences.
There is also an excellent online catalogue of Rumanian printed books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: not yet fully comprehensive, but already a very useful resource, and also with links to a number of Rumanian research libraries.

Sebastian Kempgen’s Kodeks page includes links to a number of facsimiles, including the Kiev Missal, the Miroslav Gospels, and the 1495 printed Centinje Psalter.