Schoenberg, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts. Penn Libraries. Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, U of Pennyslvania, n.d. 10 Oct. 2012. <http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/schoenberg/index.html>. Updated regularly.

A database of 194,002 manuscripts (as of 10 October 2012) of at least five leaves written before 1600 and included in the catalogs of more than 12,000 “auction and sales catalogues, inventories, catalogues from institutional and private collections, and other sources that document sales and locations of manuscript books.” The amount of information in a record depends on the catalog description: a full record includes fields for author, title, comments, provenance (which can include the current owner), artist, date of creation, number of folios (as well as lines and columns), historiated and illuminated initials, miniatures, language, place of composition, dimensions, material (i.e., paper or vellum), binding, scribe, source of data, liturgical use, seller, buyer, catalog, lot number, date of catalog, price, and record number. Results from a Database Search (i.e., keyword search) can be narrowed by most of the record fields; Advanced Search allows for searching combinations of most record fields; in addition, records can be browsed by field. Results in all search types can be sorted, in ascending or descending order, by date, title, record number, or date added to the database. An important resource that is making accessible data buried in thousands of catalogs, Schoenberg is an essential tool for locating manuscripts, tracing their provenance, reconstructing collections, and studying social and economic aspects of the manuscript trade.