CEEC – Codices Electronici Ecclesiae Coloniensis

“Obviously, a hisorical research project needs a latin title. Translated the title means ‘Electronical codices of the Church of Cologne’. This title may evoke some questions: What might be a ‘codex’? And what might be the difference of an electronical codex? And what is meant by ‘the Church of Cologne’?

Historians call books ‘codices’ when they consist of quires of different leaves. In our library most of the codices are made of parchment. (Parchment is made of hide of which hair and flesh have been scraped off.) The term ‘codex’ as well serves for distinction of the form of e.g. a role. Furthermore codices are written by hand, contrary to the printed book.1

An ‘electronical codex’ is the digitised form, the image of the ‘real’ codex. The codizes will be digitized and made accessible in different resolutions for the Web. The user can ‘turn over’ the digitized pages like a real book and in this meaning we have ‘electronical codices’. A feature to develop can be to allow users to reconstruct previous conditions of a manuscript, e.g. in case quires of a manuscript have been reordered at any time. Users should be able to re-arrange the quires in such cases.

The ‘codices of the Church of Cologne’ means the holdings of a special library, the Episcopal and Cathedral Library Cologne. As the name states, the library consists in fact of two libraries, the Episcopal Library and the Cathedral Library. The Cathedral Library is the older one of these two and exists as institution at least since the end of the 8th century, since Cologne became archbishopric by decree of Charlemagne. The first archbishop of Cologne, Hildebald, is very important in the history of this institution, for he ordered to write some of the books which still are part of the liberary today. The exceptional characteristic of the holdings of the library is that today we have a hugh amount of books which were in the library already in the middle ages and some of them even in the 9th century. Other libraries often have been destroyed or split, many of their books have been lost during the centuries. Here in Cologne we have this unique testimony for the history of education of former times. The oldest book in the holdings of the library has been written 590/604. (For more information on the history of the library see tap Historical Library.) The Episcopal Library consists of a collection of books from different libraries in the diocese and is therefore younger than the Cathedral Library. For example the Episcopal Library contains codices from the former libraries of some romanic churches of Cologne like St. Gereon or St. Ursula.”

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