Manuscript Digitization at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library: Building on the Legacy of Microfilm

摘要

In the mid-1960's a group of Benedictine monks at Saint John's Abbey and University in central Minnesota faced a challenge. They were wondering what could be done to preserve the precious hand-written religious books located in European monasteries and libraries. The devastation of World War II was a recent memory, and the potential loss of cultural material in the event of the Cold War suddenly turning "hot" was difficult to imagine. The monks had two goals: the preservation of the manuscript's contents and the creation of a means for scholars to easily access them. The task was daunting - thousands of manuscripts existed in dozens of Western European locations. The monks' solution was to employ high technology. In 1965, this meant microfilm, long rolls of black and white 35mm film images of the pages of books. Microfilm was the modern imaging solution; businesses, banks, and government agencies relied on microfilm for document archiving and access. Over the next forty years, HMML photographed approximately 90,000 manuscripts, mostly in Western Europe, Ethiopia, and Malta, creating the world's largest collection of manuscripts on microfilm. This collection eventually became the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, or HMML.