Ensuring Access to Endangered and Inaccessible Manuscripts

FAIN: HAA-255994-17

St. John's University, Collegeville (Collegeville, MN 56321-2000)
Columba A. Stewart (Project Director: January 2017 to October 2022)

Further development of the virtual Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, a digital portal that provides online access to manuscript collections from Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. This phase of the project would support development of the platform’s underlying technical framework as well as features to enhance the researcher experience.

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, seeks support for the next phase of development for its recently-launched vHMML platform for manuscript studies (www.vhmml.org). vHMML 1.0 was released in October 2015 with resources to support the use of manuscripts in research; vHMML 2.0 launched in August 2016 with an online Reading Room that is making tens of thousands of otherwise inaccessible and often endangered manuscript books and archival documents available to users around the world free of charge. NEH funding will make it possible to create vHMML 3.0, with greatly increased discoverability of manuscripts and metadata, and much richer data sharing with other digital humanities projects. vHMML 3.0 will add features requested by partner projects and researchers, and NEH support in both outright and matching funds will sustain the human resources needed to guarantee best-practice administration and continued development of vHMML.