Therefore, besides access to a manuscript in person, the ASMMF images continue to provide the only access to certain manuscripts until we reach full digitization. Nevertheless, we are still in a between-time, in which while the most famous manuscripts have been fully digitized, many others have only a few folios available online. This reviewer does not even have the proper hardware in her computer anymore with which to view them. High-resolution digital facsimiles are now so widely available that the microfiche images that ASMMF provides on DVD, in a quality matching “the standards of good black-and-white microfilm production,” are more or less obsolete, as is the DVD format in which they are delivered (vii).
While a founding aim of the ASMMF was to make manuscripts accessible for study outside of library reading rooms, that goal is fast being superseded by digitization.
The series thus hews to Neil Ker’s original focus on Old English in his 1957 Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (a focus not observed by Helmut Gneuss and Michael Lapidge in their expanded 2014 handlist, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts).
The series “aims to produce complete microfiche facsimiles of the five hundred or so manuscripts containing Old English,” with slim booklets of accompanying “descriptions prepared by experienced scholars basing their work on first-hand examination of the manuscripts and extensive research” (vii). As perhaps with all things amid the pandemic, volume 28 of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile ( ASMMF) arrived with melancholy, announcing that it would be the last of a series that was originally intended to include about forty volumes.
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