In the city of St. Gallen, Switzerland, population around 160,000, the main tourist attraction is the Abbey of St. Gall. It’s library contains books dating back to the 9th century. It is one of the most valuable collections of handwritten medieval manuscripts in the world. And now, thanks in part to a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, these books are being digitized and will be available online.
The collection includes material as varied as curses against book thieves, early love ballads, hearty drinking songs and a hand-drawn ground plan for a medieval monastery, drafted around A.D. 820, the only such document of its kind.
The idea to scan the library’s manuscripts — above all, the 350 that date from before 1000 — was born as a reaction to the devastating floods that swept Dresden, Germany, and its artworks in 2002, said Ernst Tremp, an expert on medieval history who is the library director.
What started as a pilot project in 2005 grew sharply last year, when the Gallen project was incorporated into a program to digitize all of Switzerland’s roughly 7,000 medieval manuscripts. At the same time the Mellon Foundation agreed to finance the St. Gallen project with a two-year, $1 million grant, with an option to extend it for another two years after 2009. St. Gallen, Donald J. Waters of the foundation wrote in an e-mail message, “fits into a larger plan to help make key sources of evidence for medieval studies available online.”
So now, day by day, a team of scanning experts works in a small room above the library, gingerly arranging manuscripts on two large frames that use suction devices to spread the pages and lasers to ensure that they are not spread so wide as to damage a binding.
By the end of 2009, e-codices plans to offer online access to all 355 of the manuscripts held by the Abbey Library of St. Gall written before the year 1000. This sub-project is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (New York). A further goal is the development and customization of a new Web application, in conjunction with “Parker on the Web”, a project of Cambridge University and of Stanford University Library. The resulting easier to use and better documented Web application will replace the current Web application. The new Web application will also provide the foundation for a Swiss Manuscript Description Catalog Database.
I can see it now—copies of the manuscripts available on Kindle for a $2.00 download fee. Just imagine the looks on the faces of the monks that produced the manuscripts in the first place! What a world we live in.
