Grant to subsidize project to digitize, catalog ancient University manuscripts

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is providing the University with a $450,000 grant to catalog 400 of 500 ancient religious manuscripts and then digitize their images. The indexing of the documents, which were written in the 5th to 16th centuries, will be completed over a three-year period.

The grant consists of two parts: The Index of Christian Art plans to digitize images online, a project that has already been well underway through prior grants, while the University library will begin an intense project to catalog both images and texts in published form.

Don Skemer, the curator of manuscripts in the rare books and special collections department at the University, called the project "an involved process."

Skemer said he was eager to begin a project that the library has been attempting for nearly 12 years. Initially sponsored by the federal government, the ambitious campaign crumbled in the early 1990s.

Skemer said the Mellon grant will give new life to the effort. "This is huge," he said. A member of the University's library staff for nearly three decades, Skemer said the gift "is the largest grant I've ever been involved in."

The Index of Christian Art, currently the largest medieval art website on the Internet, will take responsibility only for copying images. These pictures can be accessed as soon as they are made available through the Index of Christian Art website. An estimated total of 150 manuscripts will emerge from the Christian art segment of the project.

The University library, on the other hand, will be coordinating mostly textual documents. Only about a third of the new library indices will contain images. The rest will consist of the text of bibles, treatises, chronicles and liturgical books as well as other works of literature. Nearly three-quarters of the documents originated in a 250-year period, from approximately 1250 to 1500.

The current index is too outdated and too short in length to be of much use, Skemer said.

The library plans not only to publish the catalog in book form, but also intends to set up electronic records. Unlike the Index of Christian Art, however, the online database is not part of the grant.

Skemer noted that the expensive and time-consuming effort is worth it.

"Ours is one of the largest and richest such collections in the United States, and it's considered the best American collection for which there is no published catalog," he said.