Walters To Digitize Manuscripts

The Walters Art Museum a public art museum in Baltimore, Maryland has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant of $315,000, will be used over a period of 2 ½ years in a project that will allow the museum to digitize, catalog and distribute 105 illuminated medieval manuscripts. The manuscripts represent a wide array of cultures including: Byzantine, Greek, Armenian, Ethiopian,Dutch, English and Central European cultures. The project entitled ‘Parchment to Pixel: Creating a Digital Resource of Medieval Manuscripts", will digitize roughly 38,000 pages of ancient text and 3,500 pages of illumination.

“The aim of this project is to allow access to the museum’s collections, free of charge, mirroring in the virtual world what the Walters has achieved at our physical location through free admission,” said Walters Director Gary Vikan. “This project further fulfills the museum’s mission to bring art and people together.”

The initiative to catalog the manuscripts began in 2008 with an NEH Preservation and Access Grant that allowed the museum to digitize its Islamic manuscripts. The new grant will allow the museum to continue to preserve its manuscripts by making then fully accessible through a digital catalog. The museum’s collection of illuminated manuscripts is second biggest collection of such manuscripts in the western hemisphere only behind New York’s Morgan Library and Museum. When he died Henry Walter’s, the museum founder, left the city of Baltimore his entire collection of art, including a renowned collection of illuminated medieval manuscripts. The collection today includes about 850 illuminated and illustrated manuscripts and 150 single leaves. The age of the manuscripts date from the ninth to the 19th century and form one of the most noteworthy collections of its kind in the country.

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