A digital workspace for interactive scholarship about Vatican manuscripts

METAscripta is a large-scale digital humanities project of the Knights of Columbus Vatican Film Library (VFL) in the Department of Special Collections of Pius XII Memorial Library at Saint Louis University (SLU). The METAscripta team includes library faculty, staff, graduate fellows, and undergraduate student workers from the VFL and the Archives Digitization Center, with essential grant support from the SLU Office of Research. The immediate goal of the project is to digitize and create online research tools for 37,000 pre-modern manuscripts originally microfilmed at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV) in the 1950’s. More expansive is the objective to encourage users to contribute descriptive metadata for the approximately 60,000 uncataloged manuscripts in the Vatican collections, in order to facilitate open access for the international community of manuscript studies.