Transatlantic partnership to create virtual medieval library

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.

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