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MICE IN A MEDIEVAL LIBRARY: REVITALIZING THE STUDY OF 
MANUSCRIPTS FROM THE MIDDLE AGES
Columbia and U.C.-Berkeley Build the Digital Scriptorium, 700 Years of
 Precious and Fragile Texts Opened with a Click

	
	Will mice devour the exquisite and irreplaceable pages from the medieval 
manuscripts in the Digital Scriptorium?  Its creators, a group of librarians in New York and 
California, certainly hope so, for a mouse--a computer mouse, that is--is not only welcome 
but necessary to this online project's success.

	With the building of the Digital Scriptorium, cyberspace's first library of medieval 
manuscripts, librarians at Columbia University and at U.C.-Berkeley expect that easy 
access to sequestered documents will kindle new interest in the study of the manuscripts 
and ultimately of the whole epoch during which they were created, the Middle Ages.  They 
expect, moreover, that the Digital Scriptorium's popularity will entice medieval manuscript 
collectors and their collections either to add their holdings to it, thereby building a single 
global library, or to use it as a model for building online libraries of their own.

	"The Digital Scriptorium is a terrific resource in itself," Consuelo Dutschke, the 
curator of medieval manuscripts at Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library, said; 
"but it could be an invaluable one if it generated a viable financial model for others to 
copy." Dutschke and Charles Faulhaber, her counterpart at Berkeley, are the Digital 
Scriptorium's principal architects.

	To this end the Mellon Foundation gave $430,000 to Columbia and Berkeley to 
create the Digital Scriptorium.  The universities are doing that by putting their collections of 
medieval and renaissance manuscripts--two of the nation's best--online and opening it for 
public use.  When completed it will hold 10,000 color images drawn from approximately 
700 codices and 2,000 documents.

	"The most basic but essential value of an archive such as the Digital Scriptorium is 
that it allows access to magnificent yet fragile materials for study and analysis outside the 
home institution without endangering the originals," Jean Ashton, head of Columbia's Rare 
Book and Manuscript Library, said.

	The Digital Scriptorium has already brought benefits both scholarly and financial to 
its users.  For instance, by juxtaposing on screen a text about Alexander the Great from 
Berkeley's manuscript UCB 87 with calendar verses from Columbia's Plimpton MS 169, 
scholars ascertained that the two were once from the same book copied in the 1440s by 
Antonius Vicentius in the South of France.  Before the Digital Scriptorium, that kind of 
discovery would have been very expensive, if not impossible, to make.

3/19/97										19,073