Sfardata - The codicological database
of The Hebrew Palaeography Project

The goal of the Hebrew Palaeography Project, Initiated by Malachi Beit-Arié, was as to locate all the medieval codices written in the Hebrew script, which contained explicit production dates or at least scribe names; to study and document all their visual and measurable material features and scribal practices in situ, i.e. in the libraries in which they were kept; and classify these features and practices in order to expose a historical typology of the hand-produced Hebrew book and provide users of Hebrew manuscripts with a tool for identifying the production region and assessing the period of the studied manuscripts.

The sheer amount and variety of data collected demanded a Database Solution. Each manuscript can be described by over 700 characteristics of different types - descriptive, numeric, textual etc. where the meaning of each characteristic derives from it's context.

The codicological Database was developed over the years by Meroz Software Systems, integrating the database with outside links, images, even the worksheets made by the researchers documenting the manuscripts. To this we added a sophisticated querying engine which allows querying with all these parameters and dispaly of the results in a mulititude of ways.

The system can be accessed at the site of the Israeli National Library .