IU received a grant worth more than $280,000 to produce a digital storage space and catalog for medieval manuscripts, IU announced in a press release Jan. 28.
The grant will support the Peripheral Manuscripts Project: Digitizing Medieval Manuscript Collections in the Midwest. IU is one of three schools leading the project alongside 19 project affiliates, according to its website.
The project will involve digitizing and cataloging 78 books and 406 medieval manuscript fragments from an assortment of 22 Midwestern institutions, which includes IU’s Lilly Library.
"Every surviving medieval book and fragment has the potential to tell us more about medieval book arts, textual traditions, individuals' lives and libraries — and even, through their physical qualities and materials, things like animal husbandry and commerce," Elizabeth Hebbard, the project's lead investigator and IU assistant professor said in the release.
The project focuses on collections that have previously been considered economically unfeasible to digitize and catalog.
IU and the other project leads, Loyola University Chicago and Saint Mary’s College, will take photos or scan the manuscripts. According to the release, the project will bring light to material that was previously inaccessible. The data created by the grant team will be made freely available through digital library storage space and will be maintained by IU Libraries.
The manuscripts will be grouped with already digitized collections to create a comprehensive understanding of North American manuscript holdings, according to the release.
