The Digital Walters

Host: The Walters Art Museum
Other institutions involved:

National Endowment for the Humanities http://www.neh.gov/ Stanford University http://www.stanford.edu/ Internet System Consortium https://www.isc.org/

URL: http://thedigitalwalters.org/
Main language: Multilingual

General description: The Walters Art Museum is committed to digitizing its collection of nearly 1000 manuscripts, most of which date back to medieval times. Almost all of these manuscripts are illuminated, containing intricate paintings or hand-drawn diagrams and charts. Each manuscript is digitized in its entirety; we image all folios/pages, any bookmarks that may be found within, and the bindings. Complete, in-depth cataloguing is done by experts around the world which is then published in the TEI format.

The project began in 2008 with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), allowing us to digitize 120 Islamic manuscripts dating from the 9th to the 19th centuries. This was followed by a second NEH grant which aided the digitization of a group of 105 under-cataloged manuscripts with English, Dutch, German, Armenian, Byzantine, Ethiopian, and Spanish origins. In 2013, we began digitizing 112 medieval Flemish books of hours (personal books of prayer and devotion) with funding from a third NEH grant. As of April 1, 2015, this manuscript digitization project has been folded into the daily operations of the Walters Art Museum, and the imaging of French and Italian manuscripts is slated to commence in September 2015.

We publish all of our images and metadata on thedigitalwalters.org under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. This license ensures that anyone can study, publish, and enjoy our digitized manuscripts free of charge. Currently over 120,000 high resolution images are available, along with complete cataloguing information in the TEI format and human-readable HTML. Further information regarding our use of TEI can be found at http://thedigitalwalters.org/Supplemental/ManuscriptDescription.html.

Implementation description: Information regarding our use of the TEI P5 can be found at http://thedigitalwalters.org/Supplemental/ManuscriptDescription.html.

Related resources: http://thedigitalwalters.org/03_ReadMe.html

Contact:

Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books

The Walters Art Museum

600 N. Charles Street

Baltimore, MD 21201

Telephone: 410.547.9000 ext. 250

Fax: 410.752.4797

Email: curatorial@thewalters.org