The British Library is the national library of Great Britain. It has amongst its collection of over 15 million books and other documents, several hundred thousand ancient manuscripts. One of these is a unique copy of the epic poem Beowulf, which tells of the deeds of the eponymous hero, king of the Geats; of his battles with the half-human fiend Grendel and the monster's mother, and ends with his mortal combat with a fiery dragon. The poem is one of the oldest existing Anglo-Saxon poems, having been written down in the early eleventh century AD, but thought by some to have been composed even earlier in the eighth century.
The manuscript found its way into the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (d. 1631) and later passed to the British Museum, where it is preserved in the Cottonian collection of manuscripts, which suffered from a great fire in 1731. The Beowulf manuscript was damaged in this fire but fortunately transcripts were made of the manuscript by the Danish scholar, G.J. Thorkelin, at the end of the eighteenth century. It remained in its burnt binding until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Sir Frederic Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, undertook to restore the damaged manuscripts in his care. His bookbinder first traced the outline of each burnt leaf, cut out the centre of the tracing, leaving a retaining edge of about 2mm, and pasted and taped the vellum leaf to the paper frame. He then rebound the framed leaves in a new cover. This has preserved the fragile, burnt edges of the leaves, but the retaining edges of the paper mounts, and the paste and tape used to secure the leaves to them hide from view many hundreds of letters and parts of letters. These can be seen if a bright light is held directly behind them - not a procedure that is greatly encouraged by the Library!
The British Library, as part of its strategic objectives for the year 2000, has made a commitment to increase access to its collections by use of digital imaging and networking technology. The Electronic Beowulf project was started in the spring of 1993 as part of this initiative with Professor Paul Szarmach of the State University of New York at Binghamton and Professor Kevin S. Kiernan of the University of Kentucky at Lexington as the academic directors of the project group. The project will initially make a full-colour electronic facsimile of parts of the Beowulf manuscripts available to readers in the British Library and at other selected sites. The project was first announced in November 1993 by Professor Kiernan in his paper, ``Digital Preservation, Restoration and Dissemination of Mediaeval Manuscripts'' [1], and is now well underway.
The objectives of the project include the creation of a full image archive to preserve the manuscript and the provision of a comfortable user interface to the images for readers at the British Library and other sites. As the electronic archive grows, facsimiles of other documents will be incorporated that to help restore parts of the manuscript that were lost or damaged by the fire in the early eighteenth century. This paper discusses the use of Mosaic and the World Wide Web within the project.