Guides to manuscript research

Practical, self-contained guidance on manuscript structure, transcription, digitization, citation, provenance, image rights, and publication figures. No account or app is required.

The object

• What do recto and verso mean? Which side of a leaf is which, why folios beat page numbers, and how to cite f. 12v.
• Foliation vs. pagination Numbering leaves, not pages: converting between the systems and living with their errors.
• Parchment, vellum, or paper How to tell them apart in a manuscript, hair and flesh sides, follicles, chain lines, watermarks.
• How to read a collation formulaInteractive What 1⁸ 2⁸(−4) 3⁶ says, with a live tool that draws any formula as a quire diagram.
• Make a manuscript pageInteractive Fold a folio, rule it, write it, illuminate it, an interactive tour of how a sheet becomes a page.

Finding digitized manuscripts

• Digitized manuscript collections and reuse terms The major open collections, what each allows, and why free to view is not free to publish.
• What is IIIF? Why so many library viewers look alike, and how to get actual image files out of them.

Organizing your photographs

• How to organize your manuscript research photos Sort camera files by object, record metadata and rights evidence, and maintain tested backups.
• Renaming photographs to folio numbers Rename camera files with verified foliation, flyleaves, and quire signatures.
• Embedding shelfmark and rights metadata Where manuscript metadata should live (inside the file), which fields to use, and how to write them in bulk.
• Recto/Verso vs. Tropy An honest comparison of the two tools for managing research photographs of manuscripts.

Reading and transcribing

• Reading faded or erased text in photographs Channel isolation, levels, decorrelation stretch, and CLAHE, and when each one works.
• How to transcribe a manuscript Diplomatic transcription in practice: abbreviations, brackets, damage, and a policy checklist.

Scholarship and publication

• How to cite a manuscript Repository, shelfmark, folio: the anatomy of a manuscript citation, with worked examples.
• How to research a manuscript's provenance Reading the evidence of ownership, bookplates, stamps, sale catalogs, and building the timeline.
• Tracking image reproduction rights What to record from each permission grant, and how to answer a publisher's query in minutes.
• Preparing manuscript images as figures Resolution, formats, crops, captions, and credit lines: turning working photos into publishable figures.