Hill Museum and Manuscript Library Receives $5 Million Grant

(KNSI) – The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library has received a $5 million grant to help digitize, arch, and catalog endangered manuscript collections outside of Europe.

The five year grant comes from Arcadia and would make the digitized materials freely available to worldwide users via the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library’s online Reading Room, a website offering resources for studying manuscript cultures. Digital manuscripts from around the world are available on the website. The grant from Arcadia establishes a fund to future-proof the images by perpetually archiving each terabyte of data created.

In a press release from the College of St. Benedict St. John’s University, Father Columba Stewart, OSB, HMML’s executive director, said, “We are deeply grateful for this remarkable and transformative grant from Arcadia, an organization that shares our commitment to preserving culture and providing open and free access. We are in a race against time to save threatened manuscripts around the world, and thanks to Arcadia we will have resources at the ready to meet this daunting challenge.”

The HMML initially began photographing Latin manuscripts in Western Europe, but over the last 20 year has since expanded to multiple cultures, religions, and language boundaries. Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East are just a few areas where the HMML is currently working.

Arcadia is a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. It supports charities and scholarly institutions that preserve cultural heritage and the environment. Arcadia also supports projects that promote open access, and all of its awards are granted on the condition that any materials produced are made available for free online. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $777 million to projects around the world.

Arcadia co-founders Rausing and Baldwin issued a joint statement saying they are “delighted to continue to support the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library’s digitization work. Since our first grant to HMML, ten years ago, we have seen it grow to become an unparalleled digital repository of manuscripts, containing some of humanity’s most revered texts. The vision, dedication and innovation of Father Columba and his team ensure that these treasures of knowledge are safe and freely available, to explore and inspire, for generations to come.”

The $5 million is Arcadia’s third grant to HMML and the single-largest gift to HMML in its 56-year history.

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