The report briefly presents the existing digital collections of materials related to Cyrillic written cultural heritage of the Middle Ages and their inclusion in the Virtual Centre for Medieval Studies (VCMS), which is now in preparation under the “Medioevo Europeo” COST action. This Centre is important not only to clarify the problems of Slavic studies, which are unclear to scholars in the field of primary and secondary materials written in other European written systems and languages. It is also essential for specialists in the field of Slavic studies for problems of the Slavic Middle Ages which cannot be resolved using written sources in Cyrillic. There are two levels of access to the materials. The first level—access to the multilingual digital materials themselves, their description and internal links—has not caused any technical difficulties so far but instead only institutional difficulties related to the preparation of the materials. The second level—the level of  understanding Cyrillic materials by interested users—cannot be ensured through the process of transliteration and instead requires new technological solutions, especially when it comes to linguistic research. This will be one of the challenges facing the future development of VCMS.

 nikolovasv_elmanuscript2014 (479.75 kB)