The Peripheral Manuscripts Project

This project, hosted at Indiana University Bloomington and generously supported by a 2020 Council on Library and Information Resources Hidden Collections grant, will digitize and create item-level metadata for 74 codices and 617 medieval manuscript fragments from twenty-two primarily non-R1 Midwestern institutions. Indiana University Libraries’ Digital Collection Services will scan or photograph holdings, and researchers at IU Bloomington, Loyola University Chicago, and Saint Mary’s College will create metadata for these objects, including many items unrecorded in previous bibliographical surveys. Resulting item descriptions and high-resolution, IIIF-compliant images will be made freely available through a digital consortial repository hosted by Indiana University Libraries.

This project focuses on 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.