NEWS: Aracadia Grant Awarded: $85,000. Grantee Website: Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (emelibrary.org).
The Early Manuscripts Electrinic Library (EMEL) is a research organisation based in San Pedro, California. Its mission is to use digital technologies to preserve and provide access to historical source materials, especially ancient and medieval manuscripts.
In 2009 the Library undertook survey work for a potential five year project to recover the erased and written over texts in palimpsests held at St Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai in Egypt. Using the latest in new image sensing techniques, the Library’s project intended digitize the images and make them available as an online resource, providing comparison material for earlier transcripts.
The first Arcadia grant supported the survey work to establish which imaging technologies could enable the recovery of the texts from these ancient palimpsests. This project was an enormously exciting opportunity to bring to the public a series of images that until now have been hidden for centuries.
Impressed with the results of the first grant, in 2011 EMEL was awarded a repeat grant of $2,100,000 to support a full scale digitisation project of the St Catherine’s palimpsests manuscripts.
Over the next five years EMEL aims to digitise more than 6,800 folios from 129 different manuscripts. The project will prioritise manuscripts judged to offer the greatest potential for research and the results will be made freely available through an online digital library.