British Library Manuscripts Metadata

Since the cyberattack of October 2023, the British Library has restored only a fraction of the manuscripts it digitized over the past decade-plus. Even for those MSS now back online, we have only the images in an IIIF viewer and none of the extremely valuable cataloguing data that accompanied them at the old Digitised Manuscripts site.

Good news!

Donate to the internet archive, which made this save possible!

It turns out that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine preserved snapshots of the metadata pages from the old site. These pages contain physical descriptions, detailed contents lists, provenance info, and bibliographies—everything you’d want to help you navigate a MS online or start learning more about it. Having discovered this, I am starting to save those pages as PDFs for reference in my own teaching and will share them here as I retrieve them. See below for that list. The selection is somewhat random; I am starting with MSS that I routinely want to show my paleography and book history students.

Retrieving your own Wayback snapshots for MSS that interest you

You will need to find the URL for the manuscript at the old, pre-cyberattack BL site. here’s how.

Here is a complete list (PDF) of MSS the BL had digitized as of 2022, with the URL for each item at the old site.

Those URLs now give a 404 error, but if you plug them into https://web.archive.org/ you can find captures of those pages, which contain all the cataloguing info, from before the cyberattack.

The links from within those pages to the digitized images do not work, but you can save the metadata. If the page does not load from one date, try another; earlier dates seem to be loading more readily.

For MSS that have been put back online:

From this page at the BL’s site, download the PDF of MSS currently available, which contains links to the digitized items in the IIIF viewer.

NB: You will still need to use the old list and the Wayback Machine to find the metadata for those MSS.

(Before a recent site redesign, items were linked directly from the BL’s new Digitised Manuscripts landing page and you did not have to download a PDF to find them. Given the vagaries of the BL’s site these days, I recommend downloading that PDF and saving it offline yourself.)