Tower Topics ~ Spring 2005

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Rare books part of NEH project

Rare books in Conception Abbey’s Special Collection will be part of a research project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Jeff Rydberg-Cox, Lara Vetter, and Linda Voigts in the UMKC Department of English received a two-year, $348,000 grant from the NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access for their efforts to solve the problems of digitizing incunables, books printed in Latin before the year 1500, for electronic and on-line access. Two of the books they will digitize are from Conception’s collection: Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea sanctorum, sive Lombardica historia, printed in Ulm, Germany, sometime before 1478; and Suetonius’ Vitae XII Caesarum, printed at Milan in 1494. These incunables and other rare books came to Conception Abbey from its motherhouse, Engelberg in Switzerland.

The researchers will create model digital facsimiles and transcriptions of eight representative early printed books. They will also establish protocols and electronic tools for transcribing these works, deciphering abbreviations, and editing the texts. The project will produce an online dictionary of 15th-century Latin and resource tools to help readers find variant spellings. These protocols and tools will be made freely available on the Internet to anyone interested in digitizing or reading medieval and early modern printed books.

We welcome your comments:
communications@conception.edu
www.conceptionabbey.org

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