What shall we do next?
The rapid progress of manuscript digitization in Europe is evident, also the consensus to present the image files together with online catalogue-data in the web, but still we are on the beginning. The librarians discuss the technical aspects, the organization and the budgeting of this challenge and occasionally they consider questions of long-time storage of electronic data. But what is their target group? Is it the small group of high qualified scholars, or is it the wider community of interested humanists without any specific know-how?

High-quality digitization means - in our understanding - not only the technical quality of the image files. Moreover, it means a developed indexing, but not in the traditional sense. It should cover the catalogue enrichment, the differentiation of the scribes, the listing of watermarks, the modelling of the structure of the codex, the reconstruction of provenience-coherences and so on. Our keynote includes our experience in the field of online catalogues and manuscript digitization during the past fifteen years. It describes briefly the developing of special equipment, activities concerning new presentation forms and future co-operations.

Hans Zotter, Manfred Mayer