The notes for the present test run have been collected from but a small sample of sources listed in the attached bibliographical file, comprising ca. 18.000 notes on manuscripts, only. In the mean time the collecting goes on. The bibliographical file will soon comprise the whole Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, Archiv für katholisches Kirchenrecht, Österreichisches Archiv für Kirchenrecht, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte (kanonistische Abteilung), Proceedings of the International Congress of Medieval Canon Law. Other periodicals and monographs shall follow.

In a first phase, the main activities aim at manuscript literature of Canon law, considering that summary cataloguing of Roman law manuscripts is not as urgent - since the latter have been summarily catalogued in recent times in the Verzeichnis der Handschriften zum römischen Recht bis 1600, published in 1972 in four volumes by the undersigned in collaboration with Hans van de Wouw. Data from the "Verzeichnis" shall at a later stage be merged into the present internet data base.

The notes were mainly collected by job-seeking students who were paid by the hour, on a four-hours-per-week base. While the students were certainly trying their best, they could of course not be expected to have the necessary knowledge of antiquarian legal literature. Very often a student was only able to note that so-and-so quotes a certain manuscript on page xyz, but was not able to note the contents of the quoted manuscript. Readers should thus be warned that they must themselves control the correctness and completeness of the notes! Time constraints made it absolutely impossible for the undersigned to do this for the bulk of the work. Merely some control of plausibility was done in order to detect obvious errors. Although this means on the one hand that the data base will necessarily remain full of errors and incomplete, there are on the other hand many hundreds of cases in which shelf marks wrongly quoted in literature have been corrected or updated for the data base. Furthermore, the notes collected from different sources often correct each other. This will become ever more frequent as the data base will grow.

It goes without saying that all comments, hints, supplements, corrections etc. will be greatly appreciated.

Gero R. Dolezalek

g.dole@rz.uni-leipzig.de