Based at Oxford University and part of the Specialised Research Collections in the Humanities initiative supported by the Higher Education Funding bodies of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, this project is making scanned images of ancient, medieval, and Celtic manuscripts available for free personal use by researchers. At present, the site offers nearly 30 manuscripts, some of them rather substantial. After browsing by collection and library and accepting the stated conditions, users may view the manuscripts by folio. Most are presented as thumbnailed images in framed pages with information on the document and viewing tips provided. Users should note that the JPEG images of each page can be very large, as much as 140MB, and faster connections and more powerful computers are strongly recommended. The site recommends configuring an appropriate viewer, such as ACDSee, as a helper application rather than viewing the JPEG images in one's browser. Highlights of the collection include an unfinished Canterbury Tales with the scribe's instructions, a fourteenth-century treatise on Welsh medicine, the early sixteenth-century Annals of Ulster, and a sixteenth-century text on military science and siegecraft with colored diagrams.
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