Conundrums of Open Repositories: Challenges in Establishing a Collaborative Framework for Digitizing Medieval Manuscript Collections Across the Midwestern United States

This paper explores the challenges, compromises, and inevitable opportunities that arise when a collaborative digitization project comprised of twenty-two partners largely representing smaller higher-education institutions as well as seminaries, a museum and a monastery across the Midwestern United States assemble in support of uncovering unknown or under-documented medieval manuscript collections. Issues emerged around connecting manuscript leaves held across partner institutions, representation – descriptive and structural – given the complexity of medieval manuscripts and the domain's descriptive practices, and organization of content including metadata for the best legibility. Ultimately, the stakeholders had to balance particular requirements or expectations for this type of material with the reality that the host repository serves hundreds of collections of various types, not just manuscript collections. As part of this balancing act, improvements that would impact all collections were identified as we continue to grapple with providing the best user experience for discovering and reading medieval manuscripts in this general open repository environment.