Friday, June 04, 2010

More Cambridge manuscripts are going online

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY has received a large private donation to put more of its manuscripts online:
Cambridge University Library to publish rare faith and science books on internet
Thousands of rare books and manuscripts at Camrbidge University Library – including handwritten notes by Sir Isaac Newton – are to be made available on line thanks to a £1.5m donation.


By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent (The Telegraph)
Published: 5:01AM BST 04 Jun 2010

The gift from the former businessman Dr Leonard Polonsky will be used to start the Digital Library for the 21st Century create an infrastructure capable of digitising the vast collection housed at the 600-year-old institution.

Digitisation will be completed in stages, with the first collections to be called "The Foundations of Faith" and "The Foundations of Science".

Among the Library's religious collections are some of the world's most ancient Qur'ans and an eighth century copy of the Surat al-Anfal, the Qur'an's eighth chapter.

Judaism is represented by the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection containing 193,000 fragments of manuscripts as significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Christian documents include a Greek New Testament manuscript, the Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis, and a 1455 copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the earliest European book produced using movable type.

[...]
This project seems to be different from the Cairo Geniza Digitization Project, on which see here.

UPDATE (5 June): Tommy Wasserman comments at Evangelical Textual Criticism.