Medieval

"The Rig 'dzin Tshe dbang nor bu edition of the rNying ma'i rgyud 'bum is a beautifully illustrated set of manuscripts, originally in thirty-three volumes, thirty volumes of which survive. It represents an important collection of Tibetan Buddhist tantric scriptures, once with many witnesses, but now with only a handful of extant editions. Of all the surviving editions, the Rig 'dzin Tshe dbang nor bu edition is the most lavishly produced, manufactured from good materials, finely decorated, and illustrated with many high quality hand-painted miniatures.

"PASE is a relational database giving access to structured information on all of the recorded inhabitants of Anglo-Saxon England from the late sixth to the end of the eleventh century. It is intended to serve as a research tool suitable for a wide range of users with an interest in this period: whether academics in various disciplines, or local historians, or students in schools and universities, or those exploring the past for reasons of their own.

The Vernon Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet.a.1) is the biggest and most important surviving late medieval English manuscript. An extensive collection of Middle English religious literature (and some French and Latin), and lavishly illuminated, it is potentially an incomparable resource for art historians, codicologists, palaeographers, literary and cultural historians, linguists, and editors. However, access is currently extremely limited for conservation reasons and because of the sheer scale of the volume (the text is two and a half as long as Tolstoy's War and Peace).

Increasingly within archaeology, the Web is used for dissemination of datasets. This contributes to the growing amount of information on the ‘deep web’, which a recent Bright Planet study estimated to be 500 times larger than the ‘surface web’. However Google and other web search engines are ill equipped to retrieve information from the richly structured databases that are key resources for humanities scholars. Important archaeological results and reports are also appearing as grey literature, before or instead of traditional publication.