Grants and Contracts Details
Description
The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML; www.hmml.org), a sponsored program of Saint
John’s University (Collegeville, Minnesota), seeks an IMLS Advancing Digital Resources grant to
create MANUWEB, an online environment for manuscript studies that will facilitate access to, and
presentation, management, preservation, sharing, and use of, the extensive digital manuscript
resources in HMML’s collections, in the collections of comparable institutions, and of
MANUWEB’s users. Manuscripts are defined here as handwritten texts—generally codices (books),
but also documentary material such as charters, letters, and legal records—that provide the primary
and often sole access to the historic cultures that have shaped the modern world. With
MANUWEB, HMML intends to expand and deepen the use of its world-class collection of
manuscript images. HMML will build upon its existing electronic tools for manuscript study by
creating a virtual research and learning community with multiple pathways between its users and
HMML’s resources, as well as providing the ability to use digital manuscript images provided by
other institutions or from a user’s own collection. MANUWEB will support a range of users, from
advanced undergraduates to established scholars, in their exploration of manuscript culture and its
relevance to the modern world. It is one challenge to organize these materials and make them
findable; it is an entirely different challenge to create a lively intellectual community around them.
MANUWEB will demonstrate how both challenges can be met within an integrated digital
framework in which each component connects to the others, allowing new users to learn and
generating new content of benefit to users at all levels of proficiency. The cross-cultural approach
fundamental to MANUWEB suggests how special collections materials need not be segregated into
linguistic or cultural groupings, but can be used and interpreted in a richer environment supportive
of comparative analysis. Project architecture and software will be developed in collaboration with a
team drawn from the Center for Digital Theology at Saint Louis University and the Carolingian
Canon Law project at the University of Kentucky.
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 10/1/12 → 11/30/15 |
Funding
- St Johns University: $76,864.00
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