2014-03-06

Florence Online Again Soon?

Last year I described the wreck of the Laurenziana Digital Library in Italy. This was to libraries what the Costa Concordia sinking was to shipping, except that there was no craven captain involved.

There seem to be some faint stirrings of life in the wreck of one of the world's great medieval manuscript collections. There is no announcement on the portal of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana about any fix, but on Wednesday at breakfast time, I briefly managed to access a manuscript in the Biblioteca Digitale. They are no longer using the ill-conceived Java set-up, but serving pages with their own URLs, just as Archive.org does.

This must have been a test only by the engineers, because for the rest of the day and today I have obtained a 503 error only.

There is a touching honesty about the site: the site map asks us to report 404 errors if we see them:
Questo sito è continuamente aggiornato e verificato in modo da evitare link scorretti e fastidiosi Error 404.Vi saremo molto grati se vorrete segnalarci errori.
But a 503 is not a 404. Can we hope that the digital library will be online again soon? Is anyone able to obtain access? Or has anyone seen a blog post about this?

1 comment :

  1. Seems stable at last. Check out Rabbula Gospels: http://bit.ly/1nriNiv One of the world's most precious books.

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