The Carmina Suecorum Poetarum Latina of Samuel Älf

The project wants to give digital access to the great collection of Latin poetry by early modern Swedish authors assembled by Samuel Älf (1727-1799). Thereby it digitally completes and finishes an enterprise started more than 250-years ago.

Samuel Älf gathered Latin poems and biographica on authors during several decades, both as manuscripts and prints, but also made apographs himself.

The collection is kept in the diocese library of Linköping, and comprises 38 volumes in the folio format and 8 volumes in the quarto. Prints and manuscripts have been inserted into the volumes together, according to authorship. This entire material will be digitized and stored in Alvin, in images in high resolution.

A great effort will be spent on organizing and structuring the material, and completing it with metadata.

The material, being a conglomerate of prints and manuscripts by many authors, call for a new type of digital organization. The prints are cataloged in LIBRIS and imported into Alvin. The manuscripts are registered directly in Alvin. The metadata is then arranged according to the texts in the archive.

Thereby, groundbreaking information and data, including much statistics, on a neglected part of the Swedish literary heritage will be unveiled. Digitized prints are ocr-scanned and added as pure text, and can be corrected and uploaded again. Transcriptions of manuscripts can easily be uploaded. Thus the foundation of a full text corpus of Swedish Neolatin poetry is laid.