The Peripheral Manuscripts Project

This three-year project, hosted at Indiana University Bloomington, will digitize and create item-level metadata for 78 codices and 406 medieval manuscript fragments from twenty-two primarily non-R1 Midwestern institutions. The Indiana University Libraries will scan or photograph holdings, and researchers at IU Bloomington, Loyola University Chicago, and Saint Mary’s College will create metadata for these objects, including many items unrecorded in previous bibliographical surveys. Resulting item descriptions and high-resolution, IIIF-compliant images will be made freely available through Indiana University.

This project focuses on small collections that have not been economically feasible for holding institutions to digitize on their own and thus will bring a wealth of previously inaccessible and uncatalogued material to scholarly consciousness. This new material will be aggregated with existing digitized collections to yield a more comprehensive understanding of North American manuscript holdings.