Posted October 12, 2026 by L.P. Coladangelo, DS Catalog Project and Data Manager
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New Members
We are proud to announce five institutions newly joining DS:
- The J. Paul Getty Museum
- Lafayette College
- The Morgan Library & Museum
- Occidental College
- Rollins College
We look forward to working with these new members to make their manuscript items discoverable in the DS Catalog as they strengthen and enrich DS with their membership.
If your institution (or an institution you know) is interested in learning more about the benefits of being a DS member, please message [email protected] to get the conversation started!
2026 Annual Meeting Wrap-up
The Annual Meeting of the DS Membership was held on Friday, September 18, 2026 in Rochester, NY, hosted jointly by DS members University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology. The DS Board and Staff would like to thank and recognize the organizing committee for their tremendous and successful work hosting this event:
- Anna Siebach-Larsen (University of Rochester)
- Juilee Decker (Rochester Institute of Technology)
- Eric Ensley (University of Rochester)
- Steven Galbraith (Rochester Institute of Technology)
- Lisa Wright (University of Rochester)
In addition to voting in new members, members renewed terms on the DS Board of Directors for Regine Heberlein and Ronald Patkus. Congratulations to them on their reappointments!
Board Committee Reports and other updates given at the Annual Meeting are posted here: https://digital-scriptorium.org/about/staff-governance#ds-meetings
Upcoming DS Workshop
DS Manuscript Data Curation Fellow Kelly Tuttle will present a workshop on Recognizing Scripts in Copies of the Qur’an. The workshop is scheduled to be held online over Zoom on Tuesday, October 20 at 1 PM ET.
Recognizing Scripts in Copies of the Qur’an
Tuesday, October 20, 1 PM ET
In this 1-hour workshop, we will focus on copies of the Qur’an and the scripts we see in those copies. We will focus first on simply recognizing copies of the Qur’an and then we will work on distinguishing scripts. Reading ability in Arabic is not required. We will be looking at the shapes of letters, ligatures, flourishes, and alignments, not reading for understanding. You can then take what you learned looking closely at scripts in this workshop and transfer that knowledge to descriptions of other manuscripts in your collection. The example texts will be drawn primarily from items in the Digital Scriptorium collections. There will be time at the end for questions about items in your collections.
If you would like to attend this workshops, please fill out the following registration form by clicking here.
Please note that space is limited and available seats and registration priority will be given to DS member representatives and staff at DS member institutions. You will receive a Zoom invite/link once your registration has been processed.
New Blog Post
In this month’s blog post, DS Fellow Kelly Tuttle discusses some strategies used by DS member institutions in describing and cataloging their in-situ fragments, and the ways in which DS Catalog records reflect that data. Check out her blog post here!
Manuscript Items in Wikidata
DS continues its project to represent DS Catalog items in Wikidata, one of the world’s largest free and open knowledge bases of structured data. There are now just over 15,000 DS-represented manuscript items in Wikidata, placing them alongside items from other international collections to be searched and discovered in one place. We have been happy to collaborate with the WikiProject Manuscripts group to help integrate DS-represented manuscripts in Wikidata. To learn more about this research, please follow this link: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.431
To view a list of DS-represented items now uploaded to Wikidata, click the following link to go to a pre-populated query in the Wikidata Query Service: https://w.wiki/CK5u. Once there, click on the “Execute Query” button in the left-hand toolbar (the button that looks like a “play” button). The query will run and show you a list of items, with clickable links to their Wikidata records and the ability to download the list.