Plainchant manuscripts of the Central Library of the Viennese Franciscan Province Graz

Digitization of 53 medieval and early modern chant manuscripts and modern rare chant prints of the Central Library of the Franciscans in Graz by the ACDH-CH of the ÖAW. Enrichment of the approximately 18,000 images with metadata (Goobi). Automated transcription of the average of 2000 song texts per codex using the AI-supported application Transkribus. Management and provision of image data via an IIIF interface, long-term archiving in the ÖAW repository ARCHE. The digitized sources are of great importance for music and liturgical studies and especially for art history (noteworthy book decorations) and thus represent important monuments of the Austrian cultural heritage. Through the complete digitization, images of the sources as well as the searchable full texts of the chants will be available in open access. The source corpus including metadata will be available for the online platform on the cultural heritage of Austria (Europeana) after the end of the project.

The cooperation partner ACDH-CH of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Center of Excellence for digital research and musicology, guarantees a very high level of expertise in the field of digitization, both in the creation of images, in the preparation of manuscript descriptions, in metadata management, and in the visualization of the results on the web, the visualization of the results on the web as well as the long-term archiving. In a subsequent phase of the project, the melodies of the chants will also be transcribed automatically with the help of a newly developed Transkribus extension. (-> Handwritten Music Recognition).