This would have been unbelievable 20 years ago and impossible even to imagine 20 years before that. But it is in the world of hand-copied manuscripts 1,000 years old or more that the digital revolution has had some of its most profound and unambiguously beneficial effects. What may have taken three years to write out can today be printed out in three seconds. Digitised collections of these sorts cannot entirely substitute for real libraries. What is possible with this one collection should fairly soon be possible with all the scholarly digitised manuscripts of the world.

Source: The Guardian May 28, 2018 16:18 UTC