Resources For The Description Of Manuscripts From Understudied Christian And Islamic Traditions
Resources for the Description of Manuscripts from Understudied Christian and Islamic Traditions
From 2020 to 2024, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded a major project to address two primary challenges that hinder open access to manuscripts from understudied traditions digitized by HMML:
- The grant funded a team of curators, catalogers, and a metadata librarian to create descriptions (cataloging) in HMML Reading Room for digitized, uncataloged manuscripts from understudied traditions.
- The grant supported research by HMML’s curators and catalogers to identify and standardize previously understudied and unidentified names of persons, places, families, organizations, and works in the manuscripts digitized by HMML. These standardized names—also called authority files—are used to describe and search for manuscripts and are made accessible in a new database called HMML Authority File. Authorities created by HMML are shared with the Library of Congress Linked Data Service and the Virtual International Authority File.
Cataloging initiative
The NEH grant, with additional support from Arcadia Fund and the Kellogg Foundation, expanded HMML’s contingent of curators and catalogers to address the backlog of uncataloged collections of manuscripts photographed in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Asia. This increase helped HMML to more rapidly create access to these handwritten texts, many of which are generally unknown, inaccessible, and endangered.
Working as a coordinated team on HMML’s core collections (Eastern Christian, Islamic, Malta, and Western European), curators and catalogers prioritized understudied and inaccessible collections to make these manuscripts available online through HMML Reading Room. The expanded cataloging effort focused on collections that were likely to yield the richest harvest of names not yet in the Library of Congress or VIAF authority files.
During the four-year project, HMML vastly expanded its list of name authorities: records for 13,000 names were created, 4,700 of which had not previously been identified in any Western authority database. In addition, 45,300 manuscripts were cataloged by the HMML team and made available online in HMML Reading Room.
HMML Authority File
The NEH grant empowered HMML to develop HMML Authority File, an open-access database that broadly shares name authorities for objects in HMML’s collections. HMML Authority File uses an ontology to define the classes and properties utilized within the database. HMML provides for the public a namespace (https://hmml.org/ontology/) with properties used in HMML Authority File as well as a schema (https://haf.vhmml.org/data-schema) of the database. This data is submitted to the Library of Congress’s Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) as part of HMML’s partnership in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging.
By sharing the authorities with other projects and databases of name authorities, we help build out the scholarly infrastructure needed to advance the field and to broaden the impact of our shared preservation and access efforts.
Libraries and digital humanities projects require reliable metadata to improve access and render it more shareable within an increasingly interlinked digital space. The scale of HMML’s collections and the focus on materials historically underrepresented in Western scholarship help HMML to be an “institution of record” for information about previously unrecorded authors and texts, as well as for authors and texts that feature in existing scholarship.
NEH Stories
- Creating Relationships — Sharing the Past to Build Toward Future Scholarship
- Creating Cataloging Standards for Regional Names
- The Power of a Name
- HMML Creates New Database to Assist Scholars of Understudied Manuscript Traditions
- HMML Receives $1.4 Million NEH Grant to Preserve and Share Manuscript Heritage
