On November 19, 2023, William Potter, Co-editor of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library: A New Digital Edition of Wright’s Catalogue, will present “William Wright’s Catalogue and The Digital Wright: Serving the Past, Present, and Future Information Needs of Syriac Manuscript Researchers” at the 2023 Society of Biblical Literature annual conference.
This paper contends with the legacy of William Wright and his three-volume Catalogue of Syriac manuscripts in the British museum acquired since the year 1838 (London: Gilbert & Rivington, 1870-1872) from the perspective of Library and Information Sciences. It argues that while the Catalogue served the needs of its intended audience, namely Orientalist scholars from the UK, Europe, and the US primarily interested in Biblical and Patristic works, the changing information needs of those interested in the Syriac manuscript collection at the British Library require new methods of access. To meet these information needs, this paper introduces Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library: A New Digital Edition of Wright’s Catalogue (edited by David A. Michelson and William L. Potter). First, it considers the ways Wright’s Catalogue served the information needs of its users by mediating a univocal access to the collection organized around Wright’s bespoke genre terms and weighted towards patristic and biblical manuscripts. However, in the century and a half since its publication, the information needs of users researching the British Library’s collection of Syriac manuscripts have changed. Users are interested in a wider array of literatures, such as liturgical texts or miscellanies; new (and obscured) users, such as codicologists and scholars in cognate disciplines, but also members of the Syriac heritage communities, graduate and undergraduate students, and the interested public, now seek access to this rich collection; and these new users bring with them additional information needs, such as interest in the manuscripts as physical objects rather than as containers of texts, or questions about how the manuscripts were produced, used, and circulated throughout their histories. In short, given the constraints both of the Catalogue’s print medium and its univocal presentation of the collection, how do we provide meaningful and useful access to the diverse user groups seeking information about the collection? In answer, this paper presents the Syriac Manuscripts in the British Library: A New Digital Edition of Wright’s Catalogue project, which harnesses Linked Data to facilitate multiple access pathways. One can browse according to Wright’s entry numbers and genre terms, or by the shelf mark of the bound manuscript object. A Linked Data graph interface will also permit users to trace the connections between the manuscripts, their textual and non-textual contents, and their producers, users, owners, and custodians. Finally, The Digital Wright’s underlying data are freely accessible and released under permissive licenses allowing users to ingest and reuse the data in their own research. Wright’s Catalogue was a monument of librarianship and remains a foundational reference tool for Syriac studies to this day, but the breadth of interested users and the depth of their information needs require new tools for access that support multiple, divergent, even conflicting interpretations of the collection.