Website development
The development of the Codex Sinaiticus website was funded by the
The Codex Sinaiticus Project's Website Working Party set out the preliminary framework in 2006 and commissioned a Technical Sub-group with drafting the technical specifications for the website.
The Technical Sub-group consisted of
- Zeki Mustafa Dogan
- Technical Co-ordinator of the Codex Sinaiticus Project
- Adrian Arthur
- Head of Web Services at the British Library
- Claire Breay
- Manager of the Codex Sinaiticus Project
- Juan Garcés
- Curator of the Codex Sinaiticus Project
- Tim Hadlow
- Technical Infrastructure Analyst at the British Library
- Peter Robinson
- Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing
- Alfred Scharsky
- Head of the Data Processing Service Centre at Leipzig University Library
The technical specifications for the website took a series of criteria into consideration, including:
- The website had to bring together datasets (digital images of the leaves of Codex Sinaiticus, XML files for the transcription, Excel spreadsheets for the physical description, XML files for translations, etc.), which had been created at different venues, by different people and according to a variety of standards, and integrate them into one unified user interface.
- In the long-term, the website will be hosted and maintained by the British Library. The website therefore needed to conform to technologies and standards supported by the Library's IT infrastructure.
- In order to facilitate accessibility and long-term maintenance, it was decided not to use any technology that involved a plug-into, but to create a site built on web standards such as HTML, CSS, Javascript and AJAX.
- The website had to link image and text representations of the pages of Codex Sinaiticus in a way never before implemented in an online edition of a manuscript.
In June 2007, Leipzig University Library put the development of the website out to tender, based on the guidelines set out in the technical specification. The tender was awarded to ACS Solutions, a firm specialising in IT services and based in Leipzig, who collaborated with the Berlin communication agency 3-point concepts. The development of the website was co-ordinated by Zeki Mustafa Dogan at Leipzig University Library and was supported by Leipzig University's IT Department, who also hosted the site.
