The Swiss University Conference (SUC) has decided to support a total of ten SUC programs and nine cooperation and innovation projects with project-linked federal funds during the grant period 2013-2016.
e-codices is supported as part of the SUC program P-2: “Scientific information: access, processing and storage”. The total budget of CHF 36,312,000 (CHF 2,016,556 for e-codices) will facilitate the development of e-codices into a Center of Competence for Swiss manuscripts and digital manuscript studies at the University of Fribourg.

Lausanne, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire
de Lausanne, U 964, p. 5v (detail) – Biblia Porta

For the second time, e-codices is inviting manuscript researchers to propose for digitization manuscripts which are important to their projects. In 2009, such an invitation led to many digitization proposals, of which a total of 60 were able to be realized as cooperation projects in 2010: Sub-project Collaborative Projects.
The “call for collaboration 2013” was issued jointly with e-codices’ partner libraries.
The application deadline is 28 February 2013. Further information can be found under: Call for collaboration.

A product of the previous “call for collaboration” is our joint work with Prof. Dr. Stefan Morent, musicologist in Tübingen. This collaboration not only initiated the digitization of the famous Einsiedeln manuscript Codex 121, which contains the world’s oldest fully preserved and neumed antiphonary for mass, but also led to a separate project.
The project e-sequence contains an audiovisual digital representation of the Sequences of Notker Balbulus († 912). One can now read the oldest manuscripts with neumed musical notation, developed in the Carolingian era in the 9th century, and simultaneously listen to a recording that was reconstructed through careful study of the sources.
This project was supported by the Accentus Foundation and the Ernst Göhner Foundation; it is a joint project of e-codices, the Abbey Library of St. Gall, the University of Tübingen and the Südwestdeutscher Rundfunk 2 (SWR2). The multimedia digital edition was programmed by the IT company text & bytes GmbH.

Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer,
Cod. Bodmer 174, p. 3r – Giovanni Boccaccio,
Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes

The completion of the sub-project “Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland. Production Phase: July 2011 to December 2012” for now marks the end of 5 years of support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
With sincere gratitude, e-codices looks back on the past five years, during which the renowned American foundation not only generously supported us, but also advised and coached us. The precise questions and concrete suggestions of the Mellon Foundation were both a challenge and a great help for us. Since 2008, this support has made possible not only the digitization and the provision of digital access to 400 manuscripts - 246 from the Abbey Library of St. Gall - but also a new web application. We consider especially valuable the many contacts to other projects, to a great part also supported by the Mellon Foundation, which contribute to cutting-edge research in the area of digital manuscript research.

St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang.
403, p. 15 - 12th Century Breviary
from the Monastery of Disentis

The St. Gall lottery fund supported the presentation of 30 medieval manuscripts from the Abbey Library of St. Gall. The digitization of this selection of manuscripts had been accomplished mostly in 2010 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Among these manuscripts is, for example, a 12th century breviary from Disentis Abbey, one of the few medieval manuscripts from this old monastery which dates back to the early 8th century. Among the manuscripts there also are 16 Carolingian manuscripts, predominantly from the Abbey of St. Gall. With this, the project to provide digital access to all of the Abbey Library of St. Gall’s Carolingian manuscripts has been essentially completed.

Since November 2011, e-codices has a Facebook page, which is continuously updated with project news and activities: www.facebook.com/ecodices. The page has already been ‘liked’ by 550 people (as of February, 11, 2013). A new addition to the e-codices website is the implementation of Facebook social plugins on each individual manuscript page and on each overview page, so that particular manuscripts and even individual manuscript pages can be shared in the social network via a “like button.”