The catalogue

Most of the time the Library perspective is a flat, searchable list. The Catalogue perspective is for archival work: repositories, manuscripts and folios in the order they sit on the shelf.

Switch with the tabs above the item list (?perspective=archival in the address). The old /catalogue path redirects here. Library and Catalogue are two views of the same connection — not two libraries.

What the tree shows

The catalogue tree lists:

• Repositories — reading rooms and holding institutions
• Manuscripts — shelfmarks under each repository
• Folios — leaves or pages when you have catalogued at that level

A shelfmark can exist in the catalogue without a full bibliographic record in the flat list, and most flat-list items are never catalogued at all. When they meet, Pangur links them through the manuscript’s item_key.

From an item’s About tab, a link jumps to its place in the catalogue when one exists.

Working in the catalogue

Select a manuscript to see its metadata, facsimile links and folios in the detail pane. Manuscript facsimiles covers IIIF linking and reading leaves; the catalogue is where you arrange and browse that structure.

Photographs from an archive visit can be filed on the manuscript here or through Add a copy on the item’s Read tab. They sit in a pool until you arrange them into folios; each one says whether it is still being prepared. Transcribe opens the editor on the photographs once they are ready, and makes the manuscript’s library record first if it has none.

Authorities

An authority is the record behind a name. “Edinburgh” in forty descriptions is one place because each of those fields points at the same authority, which carries the label, a kind (place, person, institution or repository), a URI and, for places and repositories, coordinates. Analysis entities link to the same records, so a person confirmed in a corpus and a repository named in a description can share one.

The list is at Authorities… in the Catalogue pane head, or Manage authorities from an entity’s authority link in Analysis. Chips along the top narrow it by kind. An Unsorted chip appears when some rows have no kind; those were made by a field that named none, and editing one lets you choose where it belongs. The search box matches any part of the label, and both filters sit in the address, so a filtered view can be sent as a link.

Each row shows its source, URI, coordinates and how much points at it: the descriptions and the entities. Edit… changes any of these. A URI already held by another authority is refused; that is a case for merging.

Merge into… is for two rows that are one thing: “Edinburgh” typed by hand beside the “Edinburgh” a lookup found, or two spellings of a surname. Pick the row to keep. Every field value and entity that pointed at the first moves to it, blanks on the kept row are filled from the one that goes, and the first row is deleted.

Delete… removes a row. The fields that used it keep their text and lose the link, and entities are unlinked. Place lookups store what they find here, including the names they could not resolve, so a deleted lookup can come back the next time that place is looked up. When a lookup is wrong, merge it into the right authority instead: the name stays, and the next lookup lands on the record you chose.

Custom arrangements

New arrangement adds a tab of your own beside Library and Catalogue: levels you name, fields you define, and nodes that can hold an item, a catalogued manuscript, a leaf or a region of a leaf. Arrangements covers it. Switching perspectives clears the other view’s selection so the panes remount cleanly.

Sharing catalogue structure

When you share references with a colleague, they see the shared subset in a read-only catalogue viewer — not your full tree.