Activity period: December 2007 – November 2009 Website: http://enrich.manuscriptorium.com/

ENRICH, a targeted project funded under the eContentPlus programme. Its objective was to provide seamless access to distributed digital representations of old documentary heritage from various European cultural institutions.

The main result of the project is the new Manuscriptorium platform available at http://www.manuscriptorium.com. Manuscriptorium is a European digital library of Manuscripts, which at the end of the ENRICH project gave access to the data aggregated from 12 regular and 13 associated content partners. Altogether there were over 4 500 000 pages of digitized manuscripts located around the world, many of them of unique historical value and most of them in outstanding technical quality. Contribution to the Manuscriptorium system have also been given by the Polish digital libraries:

• Digital Library of Wrocław University, http://www.bibliotekacyfrowa.pl/ (regular content partner, 78 404 digitized pages from 989 digital objects)
• Kujawsko-Pomorska Digital Library, http://kpbc.umk.pl/ (associated content partner, 16 641 digitized pages from 346 digital objects)
• Digital Library of Zielona Góra, http://www.zbc.uz.zgora.pl/ (associated content partner, 24 963 digitized pages from 203 digital objects)

Moreover, Manuscriptorium was extended by the shared virtual research environment especially for study of various historical documents. Number of sophisticated tools and features developed during the project were implemented into the new platform and are now available to various types of end-users:

• TEI P5 ENRICH schema for internal storage and public presentation of digital objects descriptions.
• ENRICH Garage Engine for conversions between metadata standards, giving at the same time possibility to easily extend the conversion mechanism. This tool is developed by Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center in collaboration with Oxford University.
• Gaiji Bank for easily manipulation of non-Unicode characters when working with historical documents or texts.
• M-Tool online which makes it possible to create descriptive and structural metadata in TEI P5 ENRICH schema, using internet browser.
• Virtual documents functions, which allow Manuscriptorium users to create a new documents composed of particular pages coming from other documents from the Manuscriptorium system or from the Internet.
• Virtual collections functions, which allow Manuscriptorium users to create both static (digital objects selected manually) and dynamic (digital objects selected based on the membership criteria) collection of digital documents.
• Translation services from SYSTRAN, which allow to perform multilingual search and translate descriptions of digital objects.

The ENRICH consortium consisted of 18 partners. The project was coordinated by the National Library of the Czech Republic together with other two Czech partners: AiP Beroun Ltd. and Crossczech Prague Inc. The first two Czech institutions were also workpackage leaders as well as Oxford University Computing Services, Università degli Studi di Firenze – Centro per la comunicazione e l’integrazione dei media, Institute of mathematics and informatics in Vilnius, SYSTRAN Paris, and the National Library of Spain. Other important technical and content partners were: Københavns Universitet – Nordisk Foskningsinstitut, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, University Library Vilnius, University Library Wrocław, Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum in Reykjavík,  Computer Science for the Humanities – Cologne University,  St. Pölten Diocese Archive (Monasterium project, Austria), National and University Library of Iceland, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Centre.