Cultural heritage, as set of material and immaterial features of a nation, provides an identity of a particular people by means of which man understands his origin and past and by which he/she builds his/her future. Heritage institution such as archives, libraries and museums have important role in the preservation of cultural heritage. With the emergence of information and communication technologies, cultural heritage is transformed into a digital form, which provides various possibilities of communicating cultural heritage to heritage institutions. One of these possibilities is the project of digitization, enabling users to access archives, libraries and museums collections in digital environment. In order for these materials to be visible and searchable in digital environment, these materials need to have right metadata so that the user can easily find the subject of interest. Manuscripts are handwritten materials which makes them a special type of materials in heritage institution’s collections. There are no standardize rules for manuscript description and therefore the purpose of this paper is to provide the guidelines for a manuscript description based on UNIMARC format and its associated guidelines through mapping of their elements. Examples of the manuscript description are part of the project Digitization, bibliographic description and research of texts written in Glagolitic, Cyrillic and Latin scripts until the end of 19th century in Zadar and Šibenik area. Research opens the issues of manuscript description; for example fragments and watermarks that are part of the manuscript and for which UNIMARC format does not prescribe rules for description.