NLR Literary Landmarks
  1. NLR
  2. Literary Landmarks
  3. Solovetsky Monastery Library
  4. How to Use the Resource

How to Use the Resource

The Solovetsky Monastery Collection project continues a programme of the National Library of Russia to digitize our most important manuscripts and make them available online. The programme began in 2013 with the digitised  Laurentian Codex. The digital copies of the manuscripts were produced with use of the Depository Information Retrieval System, developed by the specialists of the National Library of Russia.

A complete list of all manuscripts in the form of a table is shown in the "View the Manuscripts" Section. The table contains brief information about books: a shelfmark of each manuscript, its title and date. The list can be sorted by shelfmark and by title. You can also use the "filter" option for a faster search in the list of manuscripts by a word (part of a word) from the title or shelfmark.

In this project, the Viewing Window displays a double-page from a manuscript, i.e. each leaf is seen together with the back side of the previous folio. There are options for selecting a folio, the possibility to enlarge it.

Special buttons above the Viewing Window allow reading: 1) archaeographic and codicological description of the manuscript; 2) entry-by-entry description of the content of the manuscript. From these pages, you can go to view a leaf you wish, for example, with decorative elements, an entry, with or the beginning of the text you are looking for.

You can also view watermark images. It is possible to look at miniature images of all leaves of a selected manuscript. A gallery of images will open by clicking on the Preview Button. Clicking on a miniature image of a selected folio will take you to its digital reproductions.

It's possible to search by shelfmark, title, author, title of the entry in the manuscript (word in the title), incipit (word in the incipit), date (range of dates), scribe's name, name of the former owner, name of the person mentioned in the entry. In view of the exceptional importance of the Dositheos collection of books , there is a special search for watermarks, that lets a user view watermark images.

The resource is provided with the necessary reference aids and a bibliography.

Researchers will be interested in the tool for comparing selected sheets of the manuscript (see the figures below).

  • Fig. 1
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  • Fig. 3

 

 

To view several leaves of a manuscript at once, you need to go to the "View the Manuscripts" Section, select one manuscript, then go to the "Folios" tab, select the desired folio and use the button . The selected leaf will be displayed in a separate window that will not close when you switch to another page of the project. Similarly, open a leaf of another manuscript in a separate window.

 

The Depositary Information Retrieval System was developed by the specialists of the National Library of Russia to form an electronic database of the manuscript colections. This search system makes it possiple to link digital pages of a manuscript with the relevant information from the database. The system is used as a multifunctional resource when working with manuscripts — starting from registration and scientific description of the manuscript in an electronic database and ending with an electronic copy of the manuscript or collection on the Internet.

Software development kits: MS Visual C#, DBMS MS SQL Server 2008 R2.

The Depository System is predicated on the idea that each handwritten book is not only a source of information, but a monument of written culture. Therefore, the manuscript must be studied and described comprehensively — both in terms of the content and as an object of material culture. In accordance with this, the Depository System consists of fields that enable to register and provide search for all important elements of the cataloged manuscript. The essential part of the Depository System are basic directories that ensure unified terminology and efficient search.

The Depository System is based on the two-hundred-year tradition of Russian archeography. The systemt implements principles of "reliability in working with manuscripts", which were put forward by academician D. S. Likhachev ( see: Likhachev D. S. Textology (rus Tekstologiya). Leningrad, "Nauka", 1983. Pp. 114–116) as the most important for modern source study.

The practical basis for the system was the RUSMARC bibliographic format adopted by the National Library of Russia. At the same time, detailed structured-field information of the database allows you to convert data into any standard, as well as "upload" one or another selected set of data for various Internet projects, in particular, enter data into the electronic on-line catalogue of the library.