Inventory of Microfilms and Photographs - Introduction

This inventory was compiled in the 1990ties for the askSam database program (DOS-based).

Udating (with bibliography and links to digital facsimiles) and necessary corrections is a high priority. Further, coordination with / linking to hyperbases on Greek manuscripts is a desideratum for which funding has been applied. However, we hope that the inventory in its old form might still be useful for researchers looking for specific Byzantine chant sources or planning a visit to Copenhagen inspect particular items.

The records are separated by blank lines. Each record contains a number of fields. Note that the number of fields may vary from record to record. Each field is preceded by a field-name and its content is delimited by square brackets [].

Proceed to the inventory: Link

List of fields:

Location [The town (eg. Athens, Paris) or area (eg. Sinai, Athos, Patmos) where the MS is located]

Library [Name of the library in the native language or English]

Fund [The subdivision of the library, if any]

Signature [the call-number of the manuscript. If the older literature refers to this MS by another no., the old one is given in (parenthesis)]

Folia [indicates the folios or pages photographed]

State [is ‘complete’, if the microfilm represents the entire MS; ‘incomplete’, if the MS is only partly photographed]

Text [the manuscript type (or types, if compound); eg. Sticherarion, Heirmologion, Euangelion etc.]

Provenance [the place of origin if indicated in colophon, or suggested by somebody (references in parenthesis)]

Date [the approximate (eg. 09 = 9th cent.) or precise date (eg. 1453 = 1453 A.D.) of the manuscript (references in parenthesis)]

MMB [indicates in which shelf or box the film or photographs are to be found]

Melodes [ascriptions to traditional composers/melodes in the rubrics of the MS. Only some MSS of the later Byzantine tradition has been examined for this field]

Author [if the MS contains prose text(s) (eg. musical theory), the author(s) is(are) indicated here]

Notes [various notes on the contents of the MS, state of notation (Coislin, Chartres etc.; none = Round Notation), [bibliographical references], See bibliographical references, etc.]

Greek is transliterated into Latin characters. Note especially the following table:

  • alpha+ypsilon = au
  • gamma+gamma = ng
  • epsilon+ypsilon = eu
  • epsilon/eta = e
  • my+pi = b
  • omikron+ypsilon = u
  • ypsilon = y
  • phi = ph
  • chi = ch
  • omikron/omega = o

Cyrillic characters are transliterated according to the ISO-norm, but without diacritics.

This article was updated on 24 september 2021

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