G. Pieken
The German Historical Museum has created the Virtual Library with the intention of giving its visitors a glimpse of the fascinating world of the Middle Ages. Mediaeval books are essential for visualising the intellectual and spiritual life of their epoch. The mediaeval manuscripts of greatest artistic and historical significance lie, however, in the strongrooms of the great libraries. They are so rare, so valuable and fragile, that they are hardly ever exhibited and are never loaned out.
This is why the German Historical Museum has invented the digital facsimile and has set up a Virtual Library, containing eleven valuable manuscripts. Together, the manuscripts contained in it cover a wide range of themes and periods, giving an overview of craft trades, the liturgy, poetry, medicine and law.
The primary principle of the project is to reproduce the original as exactly as possible. Each books is therefore shown at its true size on the monitor screens in the exhibition. There are no buttons or navigational elements to distract from the book, and the pages appear to turn with almost photographic realism. All of a book's pages are shown, including endpapers and blank pages, as well as places where sheets are missing or damaged.
The digital facsimile does not just look like a book; it can also be used like a book. The pages can be turned simply by clicking on them. The book itself is the navigational element.
The biggest impediment to understanding old books is usually their language. In the Middle Ages, texts were composed in Latin, or else (in these parts) in an older version of the German language. Yet in the virtual facsimile, visitors only have to click on the text for a translation bar to appear. This bar covers three lines of the original text at a time, like an old reading glass. The handwritten text fades beneath the bar and a typed, modern, interlinear translation appears in its place. Using the mouse to drag the bar, visitors can read the text right through in translation, with a choice of German or English. For those who would like to read the original Latin, for example, there is also a transcription of that available.
The successful communication of this attractive, but also difficult, subject was due not least to the combined efforts of the multimedia project teams with hands-on experience of actually exhibiting the originals in Bamberg, Nuremberg, Cologne and Berlin.
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