The Manuscripts for Medieval Studies Team, the Library of Trinity College Dublin
Name of nominated conservation, archive or records management service/team nominated for Record Keeping Service of the Year Award 2022: The Manuscripts for Medieval Studies team, the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
From the Nomination Form
This is an interdisciplinary project team consisting of Curatorial Lead Estelle Gittins, Archivist/Project Manager Dr Alison Ray, Photographer Caroline Harding and Conservator Laura O’Farrell.
They have been delivering the Library’s Manuscripts for Medieval Studies project, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which is part of the Library’s Virtual Trinity Library programme to open up access to collections. They have been researching, cataloguing, conserving, imaging and sharing a selection of the library’s most prominent medieval manuscripts – including the infamous Book of St. Albans by Matthew Paris.
Reasons for nomination:
This exceptional team have produced outstanding work, and surpassed all expectations, in the face of unimaginable challenges.
The project commenced in a pressured environment in Feb/March 2021. The Library had just launched the high profile Virtual Trinity Library digitisation programme, and the Manuscripts for Medieval Studies project is the flagship project focussing on the renowned medieval collection.
The team were recruited in the winter of 2020 when further recovery from Covid-19 was anticipated, but the opposite happened, and they found themselves in the position of having to relocate to Ireland for their roles during the most stringent of lockdowns - as the Delta wave hit, and the work from home rule applied. No access to campus meant no access to the collections, and that conservation research into the manuscripts had to be conducted remotely, new camera equipment tutorials happened through Youtube and Zoom, and cataloguing preparation was based on snapshots and secondary sources. The project team themselves were not physically introduced to one another for months, and workplans flexed and shuffled to accommodate public health directives.
The project funder and champion Vartan Gregorian, the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and former Director of the New York Public Library, passed away suddenly in April 2021, a major blow to the project and the Library.
Once on campus, the team were immediately active, making up for lost time, introducing new, state-of-the-art camera equipment into the process, and developing new audiences and new ways of working with them, e.g. virtual learning and Trinity’s first virtual manuscript Transkribathon.
They have developed new networks with other universities, communities and pioneering new media (e.g TikTok).
The manuscripts they have worked with are some of the most significant in the UK and Ireland, let alone within the Library, and each project team member has brought their own professionalism, knowledge, and creativity to bear. Some of the catalogue entries could be published as books in themselves (the one for TCD MS 301 runs to 14,000 words). The practicalities of the digitisation of such high value manuscripts did not pass without its own challenges, including Covid diagnosis and fire alarms. The team greeted each challenge head on and with humour, creativity and clarity.
The final digitised output is already changing teaching (e.g. through incorporation into the flagship interdisciplinary MPhil in Medieval Studies at Trinity College Dublin, as additions to reading lists and teaching materials in the UK and Ireland) and scholarship (featuring in a number of forthcoming publications) and they are responsible for making manuscripts of international interest, such as the Matthew Paris Book of St Alban’s, accessible to the public in an open way for the very first time.
If there was any good thing to come from the pandemic period, this project, the work of this team, and the sharing of knowledge from and amongst them was it.
Supporting evidence of service delivery excellence (list and attach all/any reports, images, testimony, URLs etc.):
The team have researched, catalogued, digitised and shared 16 of the library’s most significant medieval manuscripts within a 12 month project period. These have all also had comprehensive conservation assessments and treatment as required.
A good example of a fully digitised manuscript on Digital Collections is TCD MS 35 a lavishly illustrated 14th century Bible (which presented challenges in imaging as it is “lavish” in every sense of the word: large format, over 300 folios, and a lot of gold - so required a balanced mixture of lighting to bring that out against the rest of the colours).
It also has a fully updated catalogue entry, with descriptions of the illustrations and enhanced bibliography on the Library of Trinity College Dublin’s Manuscripts and Archives online catalogue.
The blog post on this manuscript by Alison Ray (Project Archivist): uses a page of this bible to illustrate how to read a medieval page. It has proven popular with other teachers of medieval history and book production. It was also used in Trinity’s EU Researchers night presentation and ‘Transkribathon’ in September 2021.
This blog post by Caroline Harding (Project Photographer) is a good insight into the work of imaging the manuscripts.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York were so satisfied with the approach, management and output of the Manuscripts for Medieval Studies Project, that the Library was invited to and successfully awarded a further $500k to complete a second project (now underway) working on a selection of medieval music manuscripts. The final project report for Manuscripts for Medieval Studies is appended here.
You can find all nominees for ARA’s Excellence Awards here
You can vote here. Voting closes on 8th July 2022