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Even in the midst of the pandemic shutdowns, the Peripheral Manuscript Project proceeded in its work.  Here’s a brief update on some of what we’ve been doing during the past six months: After some experimentation and extensive trials, our project has adopted OCHRE (Online Cultural and Historical Research Environment) as the database management system for the project. Hosted by the Digital Library Development Center at the University of Chicago, OCHRE …

On June 2nd and 3rd, the project team welcomed the first deliveries of manuscript items from our partners at Goshen College and Saint Mary’s College to Indiana University Bloomington for digitization. As items were unpacked, their condition was verified against partner-provided records, and the digitization team assessed how to proceed with imaging over the coming months. We look forward to more intake sessions as the project enters this next exciting …

Working with Manuscripts in the Time of Covid-19 As a crucial first step of the Peripheral Manuscript Project, the project’s Principal Investigators (PIs) must make site visits to each partner institution. These visits have to happen before the included manuscripts can be transported from their home institutions to the Herman B. Wells Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, where the Digitization Team will capture images of each manuscript. These meetings offer …

When the Peripheral Manuscripts Project, the three-year project to digitize and describe medieval manuscripts from Midwestern institutions, officially began on June 1st, the principal investigators and the cataloging and digitizing teams were expecting to include approximately 480 items, including codices, leaves, documents, and one scroll in their digitization and description work, based upon initial partner reported inventories. By late July, however, partners reported identifying an additional 130 items for potential …

In July of 2020, Liz Hebbard (PI of the Peripheral Manuscripts project) described the concrete goals of this project in a blog post for the Medieval Studies Institute at IU Bloomington. You can read her post to learn more about our initiative by going to: https://blogs.iu.edu/medieval/2020/07/06/peripheral-manuscripts/.

On January 9, 2020, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) announced the projects that were selected to receive funding through 2019 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards. We are thrilled that our project, “Peripheral Manuscripts: Digitizing Medieval Manuscript Collections in the Midwest,” was one of the 18 initiatives that received funding.   Our work officially begins on June 1, 2020! Follow us here and on Twitter (@peripheralmss) to …