IT and Culture: University of Pennsylvania Library completes digitization of medieval manuscripts

The secrets of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Van Pelt Library (University of Pennsylvania) have now been revealed on the internet.

A two-year grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities has allowed Penn to finish digitizing medieval and Renaissance manuscripts produced before 1601. A second grant was secured in March to digitize manuscripts from 1601 to 1800.

“Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts,” an online collection, currently offers over 1,400 online facsimiles of manuscripts.

“Van Pelt is one of the first American libraries to have a large public digitized collection that is free of charge”, said Nancy Shawcross, curator of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In the future, Shawcross hopes to secure another grant to digitize the library’s collection of Indian manuscripts, which is the largest collection in North America.

Participants of the project hope that the online collection of selected manuscripts will make it easier to search and access manuscripts, and will be a huge help to researchers in studying the epochs of Middle Ages and Renaissance.