This project is working to digitize and create item-level metadata for pre-1600 manuscripts held at institutions across the American Midwest. Hosted at Indiana University Bloomington, our efforts have been generously supported by a 2020 Council on Library and Information Resources Hidden Collections grant and a 2025 Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Resulting item descriptions and high-resolution, IIIF-compliant images are being made freely available through a digital consortial repository hosted by Indiana University Libraries.
We pay particular attention to small collections that have not been economically feasible for holding institutions to digitize on their own and thus will bring a wealth of previously inaccessible and uncatalogued material to scholarly consciousness. This new material will be aggregated with existing digitized collections to yield a more comprehensive understanding of North American manuscript holdings.
