Digital Scriptorium returns to Berkeley

The Digital Scriptorium is an image and cataloguing database that unites the
medieval and Renaissance manuscript holdings of a growing number of American
libraries. It began in 1997 with the combined resources of Berkeley and
Columbia; present membership includes thirty institutions with over 5000
manuscripts and 27,000 images, all freely available on the web. Member
institutions include the Huntington Library, New York Public Library, the
Houghton Library at Harvard, and the Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

“We look forward to expanding the membership of the Digital Scriptorium and
to developing its Web 2.0 capabilities,” says Thomas C. Leonard, University
Librarian at Berkeley. “Since the base technology for the project originated
on this campus, we are confident that the expertise of our staff will
re-integrate the program smoothly into our present system, and that we will
make the Digital Scriptorium even more useful to medievalists.”

During its six-year tenure as host to the Digital Scriptorium, Columbia also
contributed to the database’s increasing strength. James G. Neal, Columbia’s
University Librarian, adds that “extensive work was carried out by our
Libraries Digital Program Division to build a highly specific scholarly
search engine, and the coverage of the database was significantly expanded.”
Columbia’s Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, Consuelo
Dutschke, was re-elected in the annual Digital Scriptorium members’ meeting
to a second term as Executive Director; she will retain that post until
September 2012.