What is Open Catalog

In 2003 the Veneto Regional Council set up a project to catalog all manuscript holdings in libraries in the Veneto region, in order to provide a freely accessible, uniform online open catalog (1) via shared cataloguing standards. The implementation of this project entailed coordinating its scientific and organizational aspects, as well as checking and revising the catalog descriptions. The Biblioteca del Museo Correr was in charge of coordinating the project, which had previously set up a cataloging project of its manuscript holdings in 2001, starting with its oldest holding, the Teodoro Correr collection. The coordinating team, composed of Paolo Eleuteri, Barbara Vanin and Francesco Bernardi, and later also Alessia Giachery, initially created a catalog data sheet model, which features a brief description that is suitable for the mainly modern material present in the libraries (2). It provides a brief codicological description and a more detailed description of the manuscripts contents. At the same time Guidelines for cataloging manuscripts (3) were set out, which provided the framework in terms of cataloging for the MANUS software system developed by the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico delle biblioteche italiane. Together with the Veneto Regional Council an initial group of libraries of various typologies were selected, which completely lacked catalogs or adequate tools to access their manuscript holdings. They were asked to present targeted cataloging projects.