In the Swedish National Archives there are around 22,000 medieval book fragments used as wrappers for the tax records of the Swedish administration in the 16th and 17th c. The oldest fragments are from the 11th c., the starting period of the Christianisation of Sweden, the youngest ones date from the 16th c. Many of the books have been imported but there are also books written in Sweden. The major part are liturgical books, a small number are theological and law manuscripts. They are taken from more than 5,000 different manuscripts.
A cataloguing project was started in the 1930s by Dr Toni Schmid, later aided by Dr Oloph Odenius. The result of their work ending in 1995 was a card catalogue of more than 10 500 fragments called Catalogus Codicum Mutilorum (CCM). The CCM catalogue contains half of the existing fragments. In 1995 a database project called the MPO Project (Medieval Parchment Covers) financed by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities started with the purpose of cataloguing the remaining manuscript fragments. In connection with the cataloguing work the fragments are scanned and the pictures are combined with the text database. The MPO project is presented on the homepage of the National Archives, www.ra.se.
The purpose of this project is scanning the fragments in the CCM catalogue. Such a scanning means that the whole fragment material will be available in pictures. In the future the database containing text descriptions and pictures of all the fragments will be published on the Internet for international research.