Posted June 16, 2025 by Susan M. Steuer, Professor and Librarian for Distinctive Collections, Zhang Legacy Collections Center, Western Michigan University
But we only have a few manuscripts…
For some institutions, particularly those with small collections and limited cataloging staff, Digital Scriptorium membership may seem like a lot of work for relatively small return. The experience of Western Michigan University (WMU) proves the power of Digital Scriptorium to connect users with material and leverage the generosity of scholars to move our collective knowledge forward.
Digital Scriptorium membership has been significant for the visibility of WMU’s collection. WMU joined DS in the spring of 2019, but due to a variety of issues at our institution, collection data only became available in the catalog in January 2024. WMU, a regional institution with a rich history of scholarship on the European Middle Ages, holds a relatively small teaching collection of just over 100 items, many single pages. Using the DS Catalog, scholars have made new discoveries, including a blog post about WMU MS 176 (a single page) published by Jean-Luc Deuffic, a manuscript scholar based in Brittany. Deuffic certainly would never have found this page without Digital Scriptorium. During the 2025 International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Lina Elhage-Mensching, a research fellow at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony, explored DS with project manager L.P. Coladangelo and discovered a mistake in the description of WMU MS 190, a leaf from a Coptic-Arabic Lent Lectionary. We had no one with expertise in this area or with these languages, and her generosity in providing a complete, accurate description will allow WMU to correct its catalog and data in DS and better utilize the item for teaching about the global middle ages. Elhage-Mensching also learned about other Coptic manuscripts in the U.S. which may be useful to her research.
Membership in the Digital Scriptorium community has had other benefits for WMU. WMU’s paleography and codicology class introduces graduate students to DS, in addition to MARC records and traditional text descriptions. Working with various types of description in conjunction with the physical objects helps new researchers understand how various forms of description work. Students enhance their information literacy and learn methodologies beyond traditional humanities approaches which help them start thinking about the possibilities offered by technology.
In recent years, Digital Scriptorium staff has worked with consortium members to develop policies and procedures which make data submission, enrichment, and publication very straightforward, even for institutions who do not have specialist catalogers or librarians. WMU’s Special Collections and cataloging team members have learned about new technologies through DS information sessions and put that new knowledge into practice collaborating with DS staff to submit and update WMU’s data. Our staff members have been enthused about this work, which offers new, but manageable challenges.
While your institution may only have a few manuscripts, one of them may be just the thing a researcher is seeking to make an argument or understand a concept, but that researcher needs to find their way to your institutional catalog or digital galleries. Each new member, and their institutional records, makes the catalog a better tool for enhancing learning and discoverability for premodern items, which are often the hardest to describe and locate in traditional online catalogs. The technology and the community also offer the potential for scholars to work with these collections in new ways which will enhance our understanding of the history of premodern material in the United States; the ways in which they were acquired, collected, and dispersed; and to provide support and inspiration for future leaders in medieval studies and librarianship.