Medieval manuscripts are our most important sources about more than a millennium of history and culture. Because they are kept in repositories all over the world and because they are valuable and...Show moreMedieval manuscripts are our most important sources about more than a millennium of history and culture. Because they are kept in repositories all over the world and because they are valuable and vulnerable artefacts, access to them has always been very limited. This is changing as a growing number of medieval manuscripts is digitised and made available online for everyone, everywhere. However, it has been claimed that digitisation programmes are often focused more on preservation of the manuscripts than on serving the user community. This thesis explores to what extent online collections of medieval manuscripts currently meet the needs of their main user group, humanities scholars. First, it is investigated which characteristics interfaces of such collections should ideally offer, and then three websites with medieval manuscript collections are analysed to find out whether they meet these criteria. The overall structure and design of the analysed websites were found to meet most of the criteria, but functionalities at the level of the manuscripts can still be expanded a lot. This includes image manipulation tools and tools for extracting, adding and sharing information.Show less
