Annotate manuscripts and save your work to a private account.
The METAscripta Scholar’s Workbench allows users to add and save annotations to any manuscript displayed in the Workbench viewer, which is a customized version of Mirador inside Simple Annotation Server. Like other Mirador viewers, you can activate the annotation tool by clicking on the Bubble icons in the upper left corner of the viewer and use the various shapes to select an area of any page. When you make a selection, a window will open to which you can add notes, translations, other images, and embedded hyperlinks to online resources, including text, audio, and video files. The Scholar’s Workbench enables you to create a scholarly commentary or unique digital edition of a manuscript because, unlike other versions of Mirador, it will save your annotations to your own registered account, privately accessible by your user login. For examples of Vatican manuscripts already annotated in Mirador see Thematic Pathways on the Web. For still images that illustrate the annotation tool see “IIIF and User Annotations,” part of our online METAscripta exhibit on Omeka.net. Notice in the Omeka examples that it is possible to compare and annotate more than one manuscript at once, including manuscripts from other digital libraries, as long as the images are IIIF compliant.
