The New Digital Bodleian

On July 10, the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford launched a new site for their digitized manuscripts. These were viewable before in a couple of different interfaces – one had frames, and was very not user-friendly. I’ve written about the LUNA interface already. The LUNA is still there, and shows up as the third Google result when I search “bodliean illuminated manuscripts.” This may be because I use the LUNA quite a bit.

This is going to be an overview of the new site, with the caveat that it only recently launched, and it may be that some features are simply not yet available.

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My Process – Choosing Inspiration

When I get a scroll assignment, the first thing I do is find out who the person is. More than likely, I have never met them before. I always try to match the inspiration for my scroll to the recipient’s persona. In this post, I’ll talk about how I go about finding a period illumination to base a scroll on.

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Searching for Digitized Manuscripts: The Bodleian Library

One of my all-time favorite places to browse for illuminated manuscripts to use either as a resource or just inspiration is what I call Bodley’s Luna, or the Luna. This is just my own title for a collaboration between ARTstor (more on them later) and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.

My first piece of advice is to bookmark this website. It’s not an easy URL to remember. You could just do a Google search for “bodley luna” whenever you want to pull it up, but it’s worth just bookmarking. I’m not going to go over how to “search” the Luna, but I will highlight some of my favorite features. I highly encourage you to poke around with it. It’s just too fun!

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