Images of Manuscripts in NorS Digital Collections

Digitisation project 2016-2018

In December 2016 the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics (NorS) employed 15 students and one full-time research assistant for a digitisation project, which included scanning and annotating the archival material held at the department. On 31 October 2018 the first version of the online interface was released where approx. 6 million scanned images of maps, catalogues, indices and photographs are freely available here (Digital Collections). 

In addition to the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection, the Arnamagnæan Institute also holds one of the biggest archives of photographs of Nordic manuscripts in the World. A total of 1,2 million photographs of manuscripts counting all the manuscripts that were transferred to Iceland, some of the manuscripts that remain in Copenhagen as well as Icelandic medieval manuscripts in other collections such as Harvard, Oxford, Stockholm, Oslo, The Vatican and many more have now been digitized. While due to the copyright issues images of some of these manuscripts could not be made available online, all the photographs of manuscripts in the Arnamagnæan Collection (both in Reykjavík and Copenhagen) are now freely available online. Besides the Arnamagnæan manuscripts there are also photographs of the manuscripts in Rask's collection, Kriger's collection, and the Accessoria collection, as well as various images of manuscripts before, during and after conservation. This database is a work in progress and more material and data will be added gradually.

These photographs were taken between 1956-2010 by the photographers employed at the Arnamagnæan Institute and are under CC-BY license. Currently our photographer is working on taking new digital photographs of all our holdings, and these digital photographs are uploaded to our online catalogue as they become available.