Colour images of priceless, fragile and rarely seen medieval music manuscripts held in repositories across the United Kingdom are now available through the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music website.
The material, a large collection of unique and delicate fragments, has been seen by only a handful of scholars.
Copyright permission has been obtained, but visitors to the site wishing to browse the images will require a password, obtainable free of charge from julia.craig-mcfeely@music.ox.ac.uk The Diamm project is led by Andrew Wathey of Royal Holloway, University of London, and Margaret Bent, of All Souls College, Oxford. It aims to digitise, archive and make available images of British manuscripts of medieval polyphonic music, and to develop techniques of digital image enhancement, or "virtual restoration", to retrieve lost data or improve the legibility of materials that cannot at present be read.
The entire corpus of fragmentary English manuscripts of pre-Reformation polyphony, about 2,300 pages from more than 85 separate repositories, will be made available this year.