Dear DM community,

In April this year, I informed you about the beta launch of the Innovating Knowledge database. This database contains information about all surviving and identified early medieval manuscripts transmitting the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, fully or partially. Today, I am glad to inform you that the final version of the database was released at: db.innovatingknowledge.nl. Introduction to the database and explanatory texts can be found at the Innovating Knowledge website.

This final version describes 478 manuscripts, giving us for the first time a good overview of how popular and widespread work the Etymologiae was in the early Middle Ages. It is almost certainly not the final count as new witnesses of Isidore's text from the early Middle Ages continue to be identified. The database can be, hopefully, curated for at least a few more years and new manuscripts can be added to it. If more funding can be secured for the database, one day it can be hopefully expanded to contain also post-1000 manuscripts of the most important medieval Latin encyclopaedia.

The final version of the database also contains images of 270 of the manuscripts. As a novel feature, the database has an integrated Mirador viewer, which allows you to open and browse through all manuscripts equipped with a IIIF manifest (there are 264 of them) directly via the database. We also improved our free text search and filters and added two new formats (XML and Excel) to download options.

Together with the database, the project also releases the data behind the database for reuse by other projects. They can be found here.

I sincerely hope the Innovating Knowledge database will be a welcomed addition to the tools available to the Digital Medievalist community. We at the Innovating Knowledge project also welcome any tips for new manuscripts to include into the growing list of early medieval witnesses of the Etymologiae and also any corrections and additions of the extant entries in the database. 

Best wishes,