Leroquais "Bréviaires" on line.
The publication by Abbé Victor Leroquais, Les Bréviaires
manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France (5 vols. Paris
1934) has long constituted one of the largest collections of comprehensive
descriptions of liturgical books ever made. Although the books are
to be found in many important national libraries and research institutions,
they are not universally available and their physical size is not
suited to quick and easy consultation. The books have now been scanned
and coupled to a database. The scanning was carried out by student
assistants at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft of Regensburg
University. The index was copied by Elisabeth Wäspi, and checked,
supplemented and formatted as a database by Dr. Robert Klugseder,
who also devised the search facilities and created the links from
the index to the descriptions.
The index can be searched for sources according
to holding library, provenance and date, or a combination of these.
An additional search category is "Ordo", which signifies
Roman cursus "romain" or one of the religious orders ("franciscain",
"dominicain", etc.).
Leroquais' French terminology has been retained.
The link (far right in a search result) brings up a PDF file with
the relevant page. The first time a link is established, the PDF
file will take several seconds to load, since the file is large.
There are four PDF files in all, one for each volume of Leroquais.
(Leroquais' Vol. 5 contains illustrations from the manuscripts and
has not been included in the present project.) Once a file is loaded,
it remains in the computer's cache, so that another manuscript in
the same volume of Leroquais will be found quickly. (The files are
too large for use with a modem connection.)
Each of the PDF files (separately) can be searched
for individual words, using the usual "search" command
in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
The work on this facility was carried out as part of the project
"Antiphonaria", supported by the TransCoop programme of
the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
David Hiley 2008 |