Overcoming Silences in the Archive: Establishing a Collaborative Digitization Framework for Medieval Manuscript Collections Across the Midwestern United States

Description

Abstract (English)

According to sources like the Digitized Medieval Manuscripts Database, it seems as if we have reached “critical mass” for digitized medieval manuscripts. The physical artifacts, stewarded by libraries across the world, are increasingly available online to students and scholars. Despite widespread access that continues to fuel teaching and research, however, the vast majority of digitized manuscripts are held by privileged institutions of higher education or prosperous private organizations, obscuring important collections held by smaller and sometimes lesser-resourced institutions. As our project team notes in a recent article: 

“... while the imaging of manuscript material democratizes that material from the user’s perspective, digitization work has tended to reinforce economic hierarchies from the supplier’s perspective, in that the digital leap is possible only for institutions with a certain level of funding and staff expertise.” (Noonan et al. 195)

These digital inequities inevitably lead to silences in the collective archive that will negatively impact scholarship. From its inception, the Peripheral Manuscripts Project team sought to overcome some of these silences by fostering regional collaborations with various public and private institutions. Funded by the Council of Library and Information Resources, the initial phase of the project included twenty-two partners largely representing smaller higher-education institutions as well as seminaries, a museum and a monastery. Digitization and manuscript description are the primary ways that the project is facilitating advances in scholarship. In phase one of the project, Indiana University Bloomington served as the primary digitization hub, although institutions with digitization capacity were able to digitize their manuscripts in-house, according to the project specifications. The project’s subject experts, with input from partners, researched and compiled critical metadata necessary for discovery. Over the past four years, 670 items from first round partners have been digitized in preparation for upload into our project’s open-access, IIIF-compatible repository. This digitization model allowed us to develop documentation and workflows that included memoranda of understanding and care agreements that would set the stage for the next phase of the project, funding pending.

With respect to identifying unknown works, our project team, which relied heavily on the “Directory of Collections in the United States and Canada with Pre-1600 Manuscript Holdings” compiled by Melissa Conway and Lisa Fagin Davis, determined that based on our midwest collaborations alone, a significant amount of medieval manuscripts held by North American institutions or private collections remain undocumented. Elizabeth Hebbard summarizes this finding in her article, “The Peripheral Manuscripts Project: Must-Sees in the Midwest:”

The Conway and Davis “Directory” recorded more than 63,000 items (including about 47,000 codices and single leaves) in almost five hundred collections. Excluding binding fragments, which are a special case, as they have not been systematically identified in more than a handful of North American collections to date, the project has identified 1,303 items across collections previously known to hold 473 items, or approximately 175 percent more pre-1600 manuscripts than were previously known in these partner collections (315). 

In the same article Hebbard goes on to describe Cleveland-based biblioclast Otto F. Ege’s contribution to the rise of medieval manuscript collections across the midwest at the turn of the twentieth century. A controversial figure in manuscript studies and book history, Ege ironically justified book-breaking as a way to democratize holdings of medieval manuscript leaves by institutions that could not otherwise afford to purchase an intact codex while capitalizing on these sales. Research led by project directors, Elizabeth Hebbard and Sarah Noonan, along with project partners, has uncovered dozens of Ege fragments that were once parts of wholes. Through these partnerships we have been able to demonstrate impact whether through identifying and describing unknown works, elevating works of distinctive provenance or by reconstructing codices (Noonan et al. 200). 

In July 2024, the project directors submitted a grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities with a particular focus on establishing a second, large-scale digitization hub at the University of Iowa along with Indiana University Bloomington. For this next phase, we have identified twenty-three partner institutions, which are projected to grow the Peripheral Manuscripts archive by 215%. By the end of the second round, images and descriptions of an additional 1,442 medieval manuscripts that were previously un- or under-documented will be available to the public. It is in this phase that we will expand scalability for cooperative digitization that we hope will grow with subsequent additions of digitization hubs in the region.     

This short talk will cover the integral formation of an otherwise unlikely group of partners who closely collaborated to streamline a distributed digitization and description workflow for medieval manuscript codices, fragments, and documents across the midwestern United States. We will explore how our work has succeeded in uncovering silences in the collective archive of medieval manuscripts held by collections in this region, including assisting in the recovery of lesser known collections of distinction, and how that has opened the door for myriad new pathways for scholarship into these items, as seen through the potential reconstruction of the books from which some project fragments were once taken. 

Works Cited

Conway, Melissa and Lisa Fagin Davis, “Directory of Collections in the United States and Canada with Pre-1600 Manuscript Holdings,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 109, no. 3 (September 2015): 273–420, https://doi.org/10.1086/682342.

Hebbard, Elizabeth K. "The Peripheral Manuscripts Project: Must-Sees in the Midwest." Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, vol. 8 no. 2, 2023, p. 311-328. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mns.2023.a916133.

Noonan, Sarah, Elizabeth K. Hebbard, Michelle Dalmau, and Ian Cornelius, “Regional Collaboration and the Peripheral Manuscripts Project,” Journal of the Early Book Society 26 (2023): 195-208.

Bibliography

Handley, Henry. "Manuscripts in the University of Dayton's Marian Library: An Overview and Recent Activities." Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, vol. 8 no. 2, 2023, p. 365-375. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mns.2023.a916136.

Hebbard, Elizabeth K. "Ege in Muskegon: Broken Books in the Peripheral Manuscripts Project." Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures, vol. 13 no. 1, 2024, p. 54-68. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dph.2024.a926885.

Morrow, Kara Ann. "Medieval Devotion in a Midwest Collection: Establishing Production and Provenance." Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, vol. 8 no. 2, 2023, p. 441-454. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mns.2023.a916142

Noonan, Sarah and Anne Ryckbost. "The Binding Fragments of Xavier University (Cincinnati, Ohio)." Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, vol. 8 no. 2, 2023, p. 399-413. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mns.2023.a916139.