Excerpt:
The first edition of the Aberdeen Bestiary (1996) was developed as a pilot scheme for producing digitised images of manuscripts on the Web with funding from Joint Funding Councils Libraries Review Group: Specialised Research Collections in the Humanities initiative. It was a collaborative project between the University Library, the Department of History of Art and the Centre for Computer Based Learning in Land Use and Environmental Sciences (CLUES) at the University of Aberdeen.
Annotation:
The Aberdeen Bestiary, an exemplar of this genre of medieval zoology, has been scanned into this useful website. In addition to the scan of over 100 images and the accompanying text, the editors of this web site provide English translations of the Latin text and editorial comments to explain the mythology behind the various descriptions. Additionally, the site includes pages explaining the construction of the codex and the development of the site. The introductory pages should prove helpful to any scholar beginning their research into pre-modern zoology and useful as well to scholars researching the history of the book.