Report: University of Pennsylvania Libraries are Bringing Philadelphia’s Rare Manuscripts to the World (BiblioPhilly Digitization Project)

From Penn Today:

The collaborative three-year project, Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis, or BiblioPhilly for short, will digitize 475 European medieval and early modern manuscripts, and additional individual pages from the collections of 15 universities and other Philadelphia-area institutions. The high-resolution images and accompanying analyses will be made available to the public, free of charge, on Penn Libraries’ OPenn database.
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The project is funded by a $500,000 grant from the Hidden Collections Initiative of the Council on Library and Information Resources, which in turn is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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A team of a dozen experts at Penn Libraries has been working on BiblioPhilly, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, and the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text & Image (SCETI). Manuscripts are received at SCETI, then locked up in a secure location until going through the digitization process.
The July shipment, including Lewis E 160, was the last from the Free Library, which contributed 250 manuscripts, most from the collection of John Frederick Lewis. The Free Library included the largest number of texts of the 15 institutions, all members of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), which applied for and received the grant for the project.

Learn More about BiblioPhilly, Read the Complete Article (approx. 830 words)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Funding, Libraries, News