The Peripheral Manuscripts Project was initially a four-year project (2020-2024) funded by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), hosted at Indiana University Bloomington, to digitize and create item-level metadata for 74 codices and 617 medieval manuscript fragments from twenty-two primarily non-R1 Midwestern institutions. The Indiana University Libraries completed image capture for all of these items, and a research team of specialists at IU Bloomington, Loyola University Chicago, and Saint Mary’s College created detailed descriptions of each object. The project includes many items unrecorded in previous bibliographical surveys. Item descriptions and high-resolution, IIIF-compliant images are anow vailable open-access through an IU Libraries Digital Collection Services repository, in beta as of November 2024.
In May 2025, the project team was awarded a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities to continue the work of the Peripheral Manuscripts Project with 23 partners and over 1400 items for this second project phase, which runs from 2025 to 2028. Stay tuned for more updates here or at the project website linked below.