Austria
In early 1965, after unsuccessful attempts in Italy and Switzerland, Father Oliver Kapsner, O.S.B., turned to Austria to find a starting place for his fledgling microfilming project. In April of that year, at the Austrian monastery of Kremsmünster, the microfilming of medieval manuscripts began. In the course of the next eight years, Father Oliver and his successor, Father Urban Steiner, O.S.B., supervised the microfilming of more than 30,000 manuscripts and archival materials. At the largest collection, the Austrian National Library (ÖNB) in Vienna, approximately 14,000 manuscripts were filmed, along with several thousand papyrus fragments. Many of these are in languages other than Latin and German.
Germany
Starting at the Erzbischöfliche Diözesan- und Dombibliothek in Cologne (Köln) in 1979, the filming in Germany took place mostly in the 1980s and 1990s. The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) has approximately 14,000 manuscripts from from more than 50 German libraries where HMML has filmed, as well as individual films purchased from more than 25 other libraries. The larger collections include the university libraries at Bonn, Giessen, Freiburg im Breisgau, and Tübingen, as well as the Stadtbibliothek Mainz, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main, the Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln, the Herzogin Anna Amalie Bibliothek in Weimar, the Wissenschaftliche Allgemeinbibliothek in Erfurt, and the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek in Jena. Several of these libraries also included materials from the sixteenth-century German reformers. For those libraries where HMML filmed the collection, the manuscripts are included in HMML’s online manuscript database. Information on other holdings can be obtained by contacting HMML.
