Posted May 8, 2026 by L.P. Coladangelo, DS Catalog Project and Data Manager
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Eureka Fund Grant Awards
The William G. Noel Eureka Fund Grant Committee is proud to announce its inaugural awards to the following institutions and projects, for work which will contribute to manuscript scholarship, digitization, and enrichment of the DS Catalog:
- Lehigh University, $4,940, to fund the project “Making Hidden Text & Image Findable: Developing Standards for the Description, Discovery, and Preservation of Multispectral Manuscript Data.” This project is intended to build on previous work developing a functional open-source Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) tool by using commercially available Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract texts to produce AI-generated transcriptions for human validation and correction leading to searchable PDF documents suitable for discovery and access.
- Ohio University, $4,991, to fund a project to digitize and describe Qur’an manuscripts in an effort to expand the source base for teaching while increasing representation of belief systems within the manuscript materials and broader rare book collection
- Columbia University, $4,968, to fund the project “Metadata Creation for Uncatalogued Muslim World Manuscripts.” This project will recruit two graduate students with language expertise to create preliminary metadata for a number of undescribed Islamicate manuscripts.
- University of Pennsylvania, $5,000, to fund the project “Cataloging Newly Acquired Indic Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania.” This project is intended to hire an outside cataloger to describe additional materials acquired for the Indic manuscripts collection since 2016, increasing access to objects that reflect a greater emphasis on modern vernacular languages from a wider geographic scope and a range of support materials.
Congratulations to the award recipients and please stay tuned for more information about another call for applications later this year. For more information about the Eureka Fund, please follow this link.
Workshops on Islamicate Manuscripts
DS will offer two short workshops on Islamicate manuscripts for institutions who have such items in their collections but do not have familiarity with that tradition. Workshops will be led by Kelly Tuttle, DS Manuscript Data Curation Fellow, and be held online over Zoom on Fridays May 22 & 29, 3pm to 4:30pm, described below:
May 22: Introduction to Islamicate Manuscripts
In this 1.5 hour workshop, members will be introduced to the basics of Islamicate manuscript production including bindings you may see, papers you may encounter, three of the main scripts, and a general overview of how manuscripts are produced and assembled.
May 29: Types of Islamicate Manuscripts
In this 1.5 hour follow-up workshop, members will learn more about the different types of manuscripts they may have in their collections and ways to recognize them. We will focus on some common genres and clues that the layout and design can offer. We will also look in more detail at scripts and decorations.
To learn more about the workshops and to register, click here. Please note that space is limited!
New Blog Post
In this month’s blog post, using the metaphor of the mission of DS as a work in progress, DS Fellow Kelly Tuttle explores aspects of manuscript objects in the DS Catalog in various stages of completeness: from the blank surface to the partial illustration to the fully realized page. Check out what she discovered across DS member collections here!