[MR] [Fwd: [Sca-cooks] Digitized manuscripts-- Fwd: Parker on the Web]

[Elaine Koogler]

I just received this on the SCA Cooks' List...yeah, I know...it doesn't 
have a lot to do with cooking...but we often swap information about 
other things. I thought the C & I folks might find this interesting....

Kiri


Apologies if you already know about this, but I was just notified this 
morning. flowers

Stanford Report, July 13, 2005
Medieval manuscripts to hit Internet


A $1.4 million grant awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in June 
will fund
a collaborative project in which Stanford University Libraries, the 
University of
Cambridge and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, will make hundreds of 
medieval
manuscripts accessible on the Internet. The Parker on the Web project 
will create
electronic research tools and digitize library materials, including more 
than 500
manuscripts at the Parker Library dating from the 6th through the 16th 
centuries,
as well as editions, translations and secondary works.

The Parker Library in Corpus Christi College holds the collection of 
Matthew Parker
(1504-1575), who served as Archbishop of Canterbury during the English 
Reformation
and was confessor to Anne Boleyn and master of Corpus Christi. An avid 
book collector,
Parker salvaged medieval manuscripts after the dissolution of 
monasteries and preserved
materials related to Anglo-Saxon England. The Parker Library holds 
nearly a quarter
of all extant Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in the world.

Although the library has drawn visiting scholars from around the world 
for more
than a century, access to its materials has been limited due to space 
and preservation
concerns. "As unique artifacts, these manuscripts are kept in a single room
in Cambridge that is not open to the public," said Andrew Herkovic of 
Stanford
University Libraries. The web project "opens that single room up to the 
scholarly
community."

Parker on the Web will create flexible links between high-quality images 
of manuscripts
and texts and supporting texts, such as translations and commentary, to 
allow scholars
to conduct both text-based and contextual research. The Mellon 
Foundation grant
will fund one year of production on the project, which is expected to be 
completed
in about four years.

A prototype of the Parker on the Web site, containing high-resolution 
page images
for two complete manuscripts (Parts I and II of Matthew Paris' Chronica 
Maiora),
as well as all of the 1912 MR James catalog describing the entire 
collection and
other secondary texts, was released last year. The prototype's 
development was supported
by earlier grants from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and the 
Mellon Foundation.

The prototype will be freely accessible at least through 2005. Scholars 
and students
in all relevant disciplines—especially medieval, Renaissance and 
early modern
studies, art history, paleography, church history, the history of the 
English language
and Anglo-Saxon studies—are invited to visit the site and provide 
feedback to
the project team during the prototype stage.

"The Stanford team invested a huge effort to get this project to this 
point,
and I hope the payoff will be great access to the incredible treasures 
of the Parker
Library as well as a replicable model for other manuscript collections," 
said
University Librarian Michael Keller.

Detailed information about the Parker Library, the project and the 
prototype is
available at http://parkerweb.stanford.edu.