Renewing the Codex Sinaiticus website
We are pleased to announce that in November 2022 a project started to renew the Codex Sinaiticus website. The Codex Sinaiticus Project began on 9 March 2005 with the signing of a partnership agreement between the British Library, Leipzig University Library, the Monastery of Mount Sinai (St Catherine’s), and the National Library of Russia. In 2008, the project launched the Codex Sinaiticus website which brought together digital images of the surviving parts of Codex Sinaiticus in the four partner institutions, and linked the images to the project’s new transcription of the text of the Codex. The completion of the website was marked with a conference in 2009, whose papers were published in 2015. A printed facsimile of the Codex was published in 2010 together with a book by David Parker, Codex Sinaiticus: the story of the world’s oldest Bible.
The success of the Codex Sinaiticus website is reflected in the very high numbers of users it continues to attract. Tens of millions of pages on the website are viewed by users around the world every year. However, since the original website was launched, new technologies have emerged and there are now opportunities to improve it.
The Codex Sinaiticus website is currently being completely renewed with the support of a multi-year project grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). The project aims to deliver a full re-implementation of the website, using modern web technologies such as React, the Apache solr search engine, and the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIIF), in order to substantially improve the usability and interoperability of the website.
The new website will have intuitive, contemporary design and an accessible interface. Search and retrieval functionalities will be significantly enhanced to enable users to undertake more powerful searches and to retrieve relevant content more efficiently. The new site will be fully usable on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones.
In accordance with current developments in digital humanities, which aim to promote the linking and interoperability of content, the data presented in the new Codex Sinaiticus website will be reusable and embeddable in other contexts. Images will be made available using IIIF and transcriptions will be modelled according to the Web Annotation Data Model (WADM). Interfaces for direct data retrieval will also be offered.
Based at Leipzig University Library, the project team is working closely with members of the Codex Sinaiticus Partnership at the British Library and St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai. A scholarly advisory group of international experts is assisting the project to ensure requirements for specific target groups are addressed. Further information on the progress of the project will be provided here.
