Medieval Spanish Manuscript and Transcription Collection

During 2019, the first preliminary efforts began to create metadata standards to organize and describe the DS collection, as well as to publish manuscript images prepared as PDF-As (an archival form of the popular file format that is used for long-term preservation) and transcriptions. During spring and summer 2020, the twenty-eight folios and crowdsourced transcriptions were abstracted using our custom metadata descriptors and published in Mountain Scholar. For example, these metadata extensions center around medieval European themes, ecclesiastical organizational and content factors, and highly-specific issues of interreligious relations. The document, “Deciphering Secrets Collection Dublin Core Metadata Descriptors and Sample Data for the manuscripts,” presents the collections’ metadata descriptors as well as sample metadata elements for one of the collection’s folios.

Among the innovations of this new digital archive is its framing of collection descriptors (Dublin Core Metadata Schema) through the lens of Spanish Jewish, Christian, and Muslim economic, social, religious, and political relationships during the Middle Ages. The collection’s contents uniquely focus on manuscripts that record interfaith economic transactions that detail property leases, sales, individual and communal agreements, and other routine dealings documenting payment for services or religious poll taxes. At this time, there is no other collection that specifically examines this interreligious dynamic. We employ several metadata elements to categorize manuscripts and transcriptions along these lines, namely, dc.description, dc.subject, and dc.title. These elements, which are presented in English and Spanish, describe the items according to religious identities and proper names of the reported individuals. An important characteristic of medieval Spanish manuscripts is that when an individual who is not a Christian is reported in a document, the recording notary will almost universally notate their religious status (Jew/judio, Muslim/moro, Muslim convert/morisco, Jewish convert/converso) and their Hebrew and Arabic given and surnames using a Latin alphabet phonetic spelling. While these religious details exist in the original manuscripts, they are routinely omitted from abstracts and indices prepared by the institutions because these data were not important or relevant for the institutions’ purposes.

Mountain Scholar displays the full range of our metadata. In addition, the collection’s content is now searchable on Google Scholar as that search engine continuously “crawls” our institutional collections. For example, a search for “moro Burgos” on Google Scholar will locate and link to the sample manuscript described in the Dublin Core Metadata Schema PDF discussed above. Therefore, our efforts have realized a crucial foundational goal of making our scholarly-curated collection searchable using universally accessible search tools (Google Scholar) and accessible via an open source digital repository (Mountain Scholar).