The Cambridge Digital Library is a project operated by the Cambridge University Library designed to make items from the unique and distinctive collections of Cambridge University Library available online. The project was initially funded by a donation of £1.5 million GBP from Dr. Leonard Polonsky, with the purpose of developing the technical infrastructure and producing an initial batch of online content. The first step of the project, known as the Foundations Project, ran from mid-2010 to early 2014, and was themed around two main strands, Faith and Science. [1] [2]
The "Faith Collection" will have works from many different religious beliefs, including Judaism, Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. The Library's collections include some of the earliest Qur'an fragments on parchment, a section of devotional works and mystic treatises, a unique copy of the Kitāb al-Tawhīd by al-Māturīdī, and the first known Qur'an commentary written in Persian. The Library also owns over 1000 manuscripts in Hebrew. They cover a wide range of texts, such as Bibles, commentaries, liturgy, philosophy, kabbalah, literature, and legal documents. There are scrolls and fragments of this information, however, the majority of these manuscripts are in codex form. The oldest piece which the library possesses in this particular collection is a copy of the 10 commandments written on papyrus. The Library's Christian pieces include the Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis, an important New Testament manuscript, the Moore Bede, and the Book of Cerne. The Library also houses some of the earliest surviving Buddhist manuscripts. It plans to incorporate all of these into the digital library. [3] [4]
The pieces that the Library plans to use in the scientific portion of its digital library focuses on original scientific manuscripts. The Library holds a large collection in the history of science. These begin with the works of Sir Isaac Newton. The Library also has many papers from other famous scientists, including Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Adam Sedgwick, J.J. Thomson, Ernest Rutherford, James Clerk Maxwell, and Sir George Gabriel Stokes. [2] [5] [6] [7]
Sir Isaac Newton was an English polymath active as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for formulating infinitesimal calculus, though some say he developed calculus years before Leibniz.
Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica often referred to as simply the Principia, is a book by Isaac Newton that expounds Newton's laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation. The Principia is written in Latin and comprises three volumes, and was authorized, imprimatur, by Samuel Pepys, then-President of the Royal Society on 5 July 1686 and first published in 1687.
The Bodleian Library is the main research library of the University of Oxford. Founded in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley, it is one of the oldest libraries in Europe. With over 13 million printed items, it is the second-largest library in Britain after the British Library. Under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003, it is one of six legal deposit libraries for works published in the United Kingdom, and under Irish law it is entitled to request a copy of each book published in the Republic of Ireland. Known to Oxford scholars as "Bodley" or "the Bod", it operates principally as a reference library and, in general, documents may not be removed from the reading rooms.
William Whiston was an English theologian, historian, natural philosopher, and mathematician, a leading figure in the popularisation of the ideas of Isaac Newton. He is now probably best known for helping to instigate the Longitude Act in 1714 and his important translations of the Antiquities of the Jews and other works by Josephus. He was a prominent exponent of Arianism and wrote A New Theory of the Earth.
Cambridge University Library is the main research library of the University of Cambridge. It is the largest of over 100 libraries within the university. The library is a major scholarly resource for members of the University of Cambridge and external researchers. It is often referred to within the university as the UL. Thirty-three faculty and departmental libraries are associated with the University Library for the purpose of central governance and administration, forming "Cambridge University Libraries".
English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton produced works exploring chronology, and biblical interpretation, and alchemy. Some of this could be considered occult. Newton's scientific work may have been of lesser personal importance to him, as he placed emphasis on rediscovering the wisdom of the ancients. Historical research on Newton's occult studies in relation to his science have also been used to challenge the disenchantment narrative within critical theory.
Digitization is the process of converting information into a digital format. The result is the representation of an object, image, sound, document, or signal obtained by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal. In modern practice, the digitized data is in the form of binary numbers, which facilitates processing by digital computers and other operations, but digitizing simply means "the conversion of analog source material into a numerical format"; the decimal or any other number system can be used instead.
The Vatican Apostolic Library, more commonly known as the Vatican Library or informally as the Vat, is the library of the Holy See, located in Vatican City, and is the city-state's national library. It was formally established in 1475, although it is much older—it is one of the oldest libraries in the world and contains one of the most significant collections of historical texts. It has 75,000 codices from throughout history, as well as 1.1 million printed books, which include some 8,500 incunabula.
The Wren Library is the library of Trinity College in Cambridge. It was designed by Christopher Wren in 1676 and completed in 1695.
Marginalia are marks made in the margins of a book or other document. They may be scribbles, comments, glosses (annotations), critiques, doodles, drolleries, or illuminations.
The Junius manuscript is one of the four major codices of Old English literature. Written in the 10th century, it contains poetry dealing with Biblical subjects in Old English, the vernacular language of Anglo-Saxon England. Modern editors have determined that the manuscript is made of four poems, to which they have given the titles Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, and Christ and Satan. The identity of their author is unknown. For a long time, scholars believed them to be the work of Cædmon, accordingly calling the book the Cædmon manuscript. This theory has been discarded due to the significant differences between the poems.
Isaac Newton was considered an insightful and erudite theologian by his Protestant contemporaries. He wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies, and he wrote religious tracts that dealt with the literal interpretation of the Bible. He kept his heretical beliefs private.
The National Library of Israel, formerly Jewish National and University Library, is the library dedicated to collecting the cultural treasures of Israel and of Jewish heritage. The library holds more than 5 million books, and is located in the Government complex near the Knesset.
John Worthington (1618–1671) was an English academic. He was closely associated with the Cambridge Platonists. He did not in fact publish in the field of philosophy, and is now known mainly as a well-connected diarist.
The British Library is a research library in London that is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
The General Directorate of Archives is the national archive of the Republic of Albania, located in Tirana. Under the former control of the Party of Labour of Albania, the directorate houses the papers of the former People's Socialist Republic of Albania, and papers that were held by citizens prior to the regime. Completely modernized to archival standards as of 2004, with help from the Swiss Federal Archives, the archives also houses the Codex Beratinus and the Codex Beratinus II.
Quaestiones quaedam philosophicae is the name given to a set of notes that Isaac Newton kept for himself during his earlier years in Cambridge. They concern questions in the natural philosophy of the day that interested him. Apart from the light it throws on the formation of his own agenda for research, the major interest in these notes is the documentation of the unaided development of the scientific method in the mind of Newton, whereby every question is put to experimental test.
The Birmingham Quran manuscript comprises two leaves of parchment from an early Quranic manuscript or muṣḥaf. In 2015, the manuscript, which is held by the University of Birmingham, was radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 CE. It is part of the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts, held by the university's Cadbury Research Library.
In Muslim tradition the Quran is the final revelation from God, Islam's divine text, delivered to the Islamic prophet Muhammad through the angel Jibril (Gabriel). Muhammad's revelations were said to have been recorded orally and in writing, through Muhammad and his followers up until his death in 632 CE. These revelations were then compiled by first caliph Abu Bakr and codified during the reign of the third caliph Uthman so that the standard codex edition of the Quran or Muṣḥaf was completed around 650 CE, according to Muslim scholars. This has been critiqued by some western scholarship, suggesting the Quran was canonized at a later date, based on the dating of classical Islamic narratives, i.e. hadiths, which were written 150–200 years after the death of Muhammad, and partly because of the textual variations present in the Sana'a manuscript. Muslim scholars who oppose the views of the Western revisionist theories regarding the historical origins of the Quran have described their theses as "untenable".
Arabic miniatures are small paintings on paper, usually book or manuscript illustrations but also sometimes separate artworks that occupy entire pages. The earliest example dates from around 690 AD, with a flourishing of the art from between 1000 and 1200 AD in the Abbasid caliphate. The art form went through several stages of evolution while witnessing the fall and rise of several Islamic caliphates. Arab miniaturists absorbed Chinese and Persian influences brought by the Mongol destructions, and at last, got totally assimilated and subsequently disappeared due to the Ottoman occupation of the Arab world. Nearly all forms of Islamic miniatures owe their existences to Arabic miniatures, as Arab patrons were the first to demand the production of illuminated manuscripts in the Caliphate, it wasn't until the 14th century that the artistic skill reached the non-Arab regions of the Caliphate.
A 2,000-year-old copy of the 10 Commandments and other key religious manuscripts have been digitised and put online by the University of Cambridge.
The notebooks in which Sir Isaac Newton worked out the theories on which much classical science is based have been put online by Cambridge University.
Cambridge University Library holds the largest and most important collection of the scientific works of Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Newton was closely associated with Cambridge. He came to the University as a student in 1661...