[cyocum]

This is pretty true in general. Many have spent entire careers doing cataloguing of manuscripts and what is in them. The Royal Irish Academy did that in the early to mid part of the 20th century. The National Library of Scotland also has done theirs. It is painstaking and often unappreciated work.

As for imaging, there is Irish Scripts on Screen (https://www.isos.dias.ie/) which covers many different places and time periods.

Answering the grandparent comment, LLMs are not good at Old Irish. Seriously, they are awful at it. There is just too little data for it to work. I wrote a very little bit about text clustering in Old/Middle Irish (see https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680744-005). I think the better place to start is transcription and there are some tools out there which help, like Transcribus (https://www.transkribus.org/), which I haven't used but it looks useful.

edit:typos