Catalogs of individual collections of manuscripts have been published for centuries, and can admirably serve the needs of a reader working in a single archive. With the publication of thousands of manuscripts in digital photography, however, we need to be able to work simultaneously with digital images of manuscripts that may be on different continents. We need to be able to answer two straightforward questions:
The CITE architecture provides a way of uniquely identifying texts (the CTS URN) and discrete objects like manuscripts (the CITE Object URN). We can answer both these questions for a list pairing text identifiers (CTS URNs) with manuscript identifiers (CITE Object URNs).