Peripheral Manuscripts Project

By Sarah Noonan, 
Associate Professor of English

Funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Peripheral Manuscripts Project is in the process of digitizing and describing medieval manuscript items held at twenty-two Midwestern institutions. The Indiana University Libraries in Bloomington are scanning or photographing partner holdings, while researchers at IU Bloomington, Loyola University Chicago, and Saint Mary’s College (Sarah Noonan, associate professor of English) are creating 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 at the culmination of our current funding round in the summer of 2024. Images of nearly 700 manuscript items will eventually be included in the project's digital repository, including the important items held by Saint Mary's College, such as numerous papal documents, three manuscript codices, and a range of fragments of musical and devotional manuscripts.

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.