I am very glad to see the images available, and am sure that a lot of very good work was put into the scanning and transcription, much less the political fight that eventually allowed the rights to the expensive scans to be made public.<p>That said, it is a bit sad to see yet another manuscript viewing UI in yet another siloed archive. More specifically:<p>- There is no way to link to an individual page, so while the manuscript is "online" it is not addressable as part of the linked web. Scholars who write about the manuscript will be unable to link to a specific item or to share linked-data with one another.<p>- How long will these URLs be valid? "<a href="http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04004/" rel="nofollow">http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-04004/</a> seems like the sort of thing that might get changed at the next departmental reorganization or database change.<p>- When viewing the manuscript, the hidden "contents" tab is far more valuable than the open "introduction" tab, and by default each manuscript is opened to page 0, which usually requires about ten manual page turns before landing at even the title page.<p>Some things that would be very nice to see in this field:<p>- An accepted metadata format or REST protocol for manuscripts, so that we could use a viewer of choice<p>- An inventive scholar to write digital scholarship that comments on these manuscripts using the full power of hypertext to link pages together, trace themes or ideas through different parts of the text, compare proof or notation methods between different texts in the corpus.
Israel's National Library holds another collection of Newton, composed of his notes on matters non scientific: mostly alchemy and theology.<p>Scans of which were recently made available online at <a href="http://dlib.nli.org.il/R/?func=collections&collection_id=785" rel="nofollow">http://dlib.nli.org.il/R/?func=collections&collection_id...</a>.
6 (but it seems as if there's some problem with the website ATM.)
Newton has been an inspiration. There was a famous quote by him that always stuck by me: "If others would think as hard as I did, then they would get similar results."