Collaborative Agreement Reached Between Oxford University and ARTstor

Oxford University and ARTstor Inc. announced today that they had
reached an agreement whereby Oxford University’s Bodleian Library and
ARTstor will collaborate on the digitization and distribution through
ARTstor of approximately 25,000 high quality images of manuscript
paintings and drawings from the Bodleian Library’s outstanding
collection of medieval and renaissance illuminated western
manuscripts.

With more than 10,000 volumes, the Bodleian Library’s Department of
Special Collections and Western Manuscripts has one of the greatest
collections of western medieval manuscripts in the world. In recent
years, the Bodleian Library has – with support from the Getty Trust –
been developing an Electronic Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance
Manuscripts (see http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/medieval/).
The present collaboration with ARTstor will build on the foundation
laid through that important effort. Through this partnership, ARTstor
will digitize virtually all of the illuminated manuscript leaves from
Bodleian manuscripts through the 16th century, as well as selected
19th and 20th- century manuscripts in the medieval tradition. The
project will also selectively include significant bindings,
illuminated initials, and text pages. The present collaboration will
make this rich body of visual material and related scholarship
available online and at high resolution for the first time. The
audience for these highly valued materials will include not only art
historians and medievalists but also scholars, teachers, and students
throughout the humanities and beyond, who will value having the
ability to access, browse, and make rich educational and scholarly
uses of this unique corpus of images.

In reaching this agreement, Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special
Collections and Western Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library, expressed
his enthusiasm in collaborating with ARTstor and in using digital
technologies to make this important scholarly resource more broadly
available for noncommercial pedagogical and scholarly purposes. “The
Bodleian Library at Oxford is delighted to be working with ARTstor in
making the tens of thousands of manuscript illuminations in our
Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts more widely
available to students and researchers in the field.” James Shulman,
ARTstor’s Executive Director, expressed ARTstor’s keen interest in
this partnership. “The Bodleian Library’s medieval and renaissance
manuscript collections are legendary. We at ARTstor are delighted to
help make their artistic content more readily available to scholars,
teachers and students.”

The Bodleian Library is the main research library of the University of
Oxford. It is also a copyright deposit library and its collections are
used by scholars from around the world. In addition, the Bodleian
consists of nine other libraries, in separate locations in Oxford: the
Bodleian Japanese Library, the Bodleian Law Library, the Hooke
Library, the Indian Institute Library, the Oriental Institute Library,
the Philosophy Library, the Radcliffe Science Library, the Bodleian
Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House and the
Vere Harmsworth Library.