Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum, which houses a vast collection of paintings, sculptures, art objects, and artifacts from around the world and throughout the ages, has joined forces with Stanford University Libraries to digitize its medieval manuscript collection. The Walters plans to make the works available online and has reached an agreement with Stanford Libraries to give over 100,000 high-resolution images of its manuscripts to the University’s Digital Repository.
While the original manuscripts will remain at the Walters Museum, the high-resolution images will be accessible to scholars around the world so that they can analyze the works and compare them with manuscripts in other locations.
The Walters Art Museum currently has 850 medieval illuminated manuscripts and 150 single leaves, which range in date from the 9th to the 19th century; it is one of the most significant collections of medieval manuscripts in North America.