The Walters Debuts New Manuscripts Website

Baltimore, MD— The Walters Art Museum has launched a new website that houses its digital collection of manuscripts: manuscripts.thewalters.org. Featuring a user-friendly design, the site provides visitors with intuitive search options, including the ability to refine their search by date, geography, subject, culture, and more. It also gives users a chance to coordinate their own online collections by gathering, saving and sharing their favorite masterpieces.

Over the past decade, cataloguers, conservators, curators and digitization specialists have been poring over the museum’s collection of more than 900 manuscripts dating from the 8^th to the 20^th century. The new site is designed to make these works accessible to scholars and curiosity seekers alike, bringing the Walters’ manuscript holdings to the widest possible audience.

“The Walters is among the first institutions to distribute its digital manuscript images under a Creative Commons 3.0 license that allows visitors to download publication-quality pictures for free,” said Julia Marciari-Alexander, Andrea B. and John H. Laporte Director of the Walters Art Museum. “This benefit has been a key aspect of the Walters digitization project since the beginning, and has already piqued significant interest in the museum’s collection, as manuscripts from the Walters have started to appear on the covers of books, in scholarly articles and on social media.”

The manuscript digitization project was initially supported by three substantial grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the first of which was awarded in 2007, and a generous gift from an anonymous donor. The culmination of a decade of work, the manuscripts site features an extraordinary level of detail in the information it disseminates about each work, including the flyleaves, annotated margins and bindings. To date, the Walters has digitized 45 percent of its manuscripts collection.

“Here we have digital surrogates of entire manuscripts and not just the illuminated pages,” says Amy Landau, director of curatorial affairs and curator of Islamic and South & Southeast Asian art, a content specialist for the project who oversaw the digitization of the Islamic works. “When you have a collection that’s one of the best in the United States in terms of its manuscript holdings, you want to break new ground.”

Among the highlights users can enjoy in their entirety is an illuminated 13th -century Book of Hours from England (W.102) with appealing imagery, including a hooded figure pulling words up the side of a page with a rope, to the spot where the book’s actual scribe had forgotten to place the text. Also in the online manuscripts collection is the Islamic Book on Navigation (W. 658), a 17th -18th-century collection of maps that provide a view of how people understood the world in terms of cartography—one of the most important Ottoman compilations of maps, seas, and ports known today.

“Making the images completely free really encourages people to research our works because they know that they can then publish them,” says Lynley Herbert, Robert and Nancy Hall Assistant Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts cataloguer of the medieval works. “It’s an exciting moment for manuscript scholarship.”

The manuscripts site, an ongoing project, joins the museum’s growing network of online resources, including its general website, thewalters.org, and its online collection, art.thewalters.org.

About the Walters Art Museum
The Walters Art Museum, located in downtown Baltimore’s historic Mount Vernon Cultural District at North Charles and Centre Streets, is free and open to the public. At the time of his death in 1931, museum founder Henry Walters left his entire collection of art to the city of Baltimore. Its collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art, and Old Master and 19th-century paintings. The Museum Store offers distinctive gifts, jewelry and books based on the museum’s collections.

Free admission to the Walters Art Museum is made possible by the combined generosity of individual members, friends and benefactors, foundations, corporations, and grants from the City of Baltimore, Maryland State Arts Council, Citizens of Baltimore County, and Howard County Government and Howard County Arts Council.

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