World libraries: British Library posts Greek manuscripts to Web

The British Library said that it was making more than a quarter of its 1,000 volume-strong collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free of charge, something curators there hope will be a boon to historians, biblical scholars and students of classical Greece alike.

Highlights of manuscripts include a famous collection of Aesopic fables discovered on Mount Athos in 1842. Another batch of about 250 documents is due to be published online in 2012.

Although the manuscripts have long been available to scholars who made the trip to the British Library's reading rooms, curator Scot McKendrick said their posting to the web was opening antiquity to the entire world.

The British library has already digitized the core of its collection. In 2009 specialists of the British Library published on the Web 800 pages of Codex Sinaiticus, one of the two oldest Greek manuscripts of the Old and the New Testaments. Apart from the British Library the project brought together National Library of Russia, the Leipzig University Library, as well as St. Catherine’s Monastery Library at Mount Sinai.

What is more, the British Library provided online access to Lindisfarne Gospels, illuminated Latin manuscript, created end 7th – beg. 8th cc. It has also digitized several sketches and drafts made by Leonardo da Vinci.