Medieval manuscript research has always required proximity to the object, to the institution, and to the colleagues who share your specialisation. Digital tools can replicate the proximity to the object. The harder problem is replicating the collaborative infrastructure that surrounds archival work: annotation conventions, access management, the handover of notes between researchers, and the long-term archiving of scholarly additions that accumulate around a witness.
Manu was built to address that problem. The platform started as an internal tool for a research group at Charles University in Prague that needed a single place to annotate a manuscript collection. None of the available tools combined IIIF compatibility, fine-grained access control and a data model grounded in open standards.