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The Manuscripts:
Nearly all of the Walters’ collection of 128 Islamic codices and 60 loose leaves are available on the Digital Walters and in the Stanford Digital Repository. All of them are accompanied by detailed manuscript description information in machine-readable TEI format. Because of their fragile condition or their inordinately large or small sizes, however, a few of the Islamic manuscripts could not be imaged as part of the Islamic Digital Resource project. The Walters is now digitizing its English, Dutch, German, Armenian, Byzantine and Ethiopian manuscripts for the Parchment to Pixel project. As with the Islamic manuscripts, conservation and size considerations may prohibit the digitization of some of these manuscripts.
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Manuscript images and descriptions are produced by the Walters team as they are completed. Images are added frequently, as the digitization takes place. TEI manuscript descriptions also appear as they become available, but this may be as long as two years after the images are added, as their delivery depends on the completing to cataloging and an editorial review process. Stanford Digital Repository mirrors the content available from the Digital Walters site (www.thedigitalwalters.org), provides long-term preservation of the content, and adds additional functionality for re-use.
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The Walters Art Museum and Stanford Digital Repository:
About two-thirds of the manuscript page images are already online through the Walters’ website – but the Stanford Digital Repository will add two important advantages: Stanford will give a long-term protection against file loss or corruption and it will also provide access to the files in a searchable environment. (The original manuscripts remain at the Walters Museum.) Further, Stanford Digital Repository's web services allow these contents to be re-used alongside other world-class collections.
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About the Walters Museum:
The Walters Art Museum is located in downtown Baltimore’s historic Mount Vernon Cultural District at North Charles and Centre Streets. At the time of his death in 1931, museum founder Henry Walters left his entire collection of art – including a legendary collection of illuminated medieval manuscripts that is a national treasure – to the city of Baltimore. Between 1895 and 1931, Walters collected around 730 codices. Its permanent collection includes ancient art, medieval art and manuscripts, decorative objects, Asian art and Old Master and 19th-century paintings.
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Working with the Manuscripts:
As part of the collaboration between the Walters Art Museum and Stanford University Libraries, all of the Walters' manuscripts hosted online at Stanford are available for re-use in other tools and environments. As an example of this kind of re-use, all of the manuscripts in this collection are available in the "T-PEN" transcription tool developed at Saint Louis University (http://t-pen.org).
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