Walters Art Museum Receives Grant to Digitize Manuscripts
By STAN PARCHIN
April 5, 2010
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| Armenian. Toros Roslin Gospels (detail: Nativity). 1262. Paint, ink and gold on parchment. Ms. 539, fol. 208v. Walters Art Museum. |
The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland received a $315,00 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to digitize, catalog and distribute 105 of its medieval illuminated manuscripts. The project, lasting two-and-one-half years, is called Parchment to Pixel: Creating a Digital Resource of Medieval Manuscripts. Works from the Byzantine, Greek, Armenian, Ethiopian, Dutch, English and Central European traditions will be computerized, including 38,000 pages of ancient text and 3,500 pages of illumination.
The resulting digital catalog and library of images will be available to diverse audiences through scholarly and public databases worldwide under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.
An NEH Preservation and Access Grant in 2008 allowed the museum to create, preserve and make accessible fully catalogued digital surrogates of its manuscripts, among them its entire collection of Islamic works and single pages amounting to approximately 53,000 images to be made available for public access.
Gary Vikan, Director of the Walters Art Museum, said, “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. This project further fulfills the museum’s mission to bring art and people together.”
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