Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarilyas medium of scholarly exchange and as liturgical language of the Roman Catholic Church, but also as language of science, literature, law, and administration. Therefore Latin-skills are the basic premise to read and understand a wide range of sources from this period of time. We would like to draw your attention to two tutorials created by experts from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland National Archives that provide help to improve reading skills in Medieval Latin by translating sentences taken from real documents held at The National Archives.
The archivist, writer and filmmakerRick Prelinger founded the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Prelinger has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 1,970 films available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse.
As the quantity of software for managing bibliographical references and information increased during the past years the range of products makes it necessary to define criteria for choosing one or the other. These criteria are for example the variety of import and export file formats, citation styles, options to manage many different information in a complex software structure, usability, database connectivity, good net binding, and last but not least independence from the Internet.
Individual needs play a substantial role in the choice of a software. Therefore it is important to figure them out clearly and to test different programs. The free software “Litlink” has been developed especially for the requirements of historians. It combines facilities for managing bibliographical references relating them to articles, reviews, photographs etc with those ones that are necessary to administerate archival materials and references. Litlink is a multi-dimensional slip box that offers almost unlimited linkage possibilities.
Wikisource like Wikipedia is an on-line project of the Wikimedia Foundation which is based on the MediaWiki-Software. Texts, pictures, audio recordings stored and jointly edited there are free of copyright, either because this has expired or because the text has been released under a free license. Wikisource is splitted up into language domains, e.g. English, German, French, Hebrew (ויקיטקסט), Polish (Wikiźródła) and Russian (Викитека).
The Illustration above depicting medieval Rome is from the Nuremberg Chronicle, a current project of German Wikisource.
The book “Archivalische Quellen” by Beck and Henning is a standard work and solid guidepost for ancillary sciences in the field of history an archival research: It has been out of print for a long time. Now, a fourth and revised edition has been published. It is extended by a chapter about New Media and the challenge of theirstorage for the long-run.
