News | January 8, 2016

Philadelphia-Area Libraries to Create the Country’s Largest Regional Online Collection of Medieval Manuscripts

JANUARY 2016--The Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) today announced that member library Lehigh University has been awarded a $499,086 grant on PACSCL’s behalf from the Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives initiative of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,  for its project Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis: Toward a Comprehensive Online Library of Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts in PACSCL Libraries in Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware.

The project, led by PACSCL members Lehigh University, Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and involving a total of 15 partner institutions, will complete the digitization and online presentation of virtually all of the region’s medieval manuscripts - a total of almost 160,000 pages from more than 400 individual volumes. The  images, together with descriptive metadata, will be released into the public domain and easily downloadable at high resolution.

More information here: http://pacscl.org/BibliothecaPhiladelphiensis