The finding aids provide a thorough account of manuscript collections and archival materials available at the University of Pennsylvania. Finding aids include an inventory of the collection as well as relevant background information.
Mapping Manuscript Migrations (MMM) is a semantic portal for finding and studying pre-modern manuscripts and their movements, based on linked collections of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, the Bodleian Libraries, and the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes. Researchers are able to analyse and visualize the aggregated data at scales ranging from individual manuscripts to thousands of manuscripts.
Digital collections and projects feature unique, primary-source materials for teaching, research, and discovery drawn from the Penn Libraries’ signature collections or from our collaborations with the Penn community and with cultural heritage institutions. It provides access to important rare books, manuscripts, photographs and multimedia sources represented by images, texts, audio files, bibliographic databases, catalogs, and archival finding aids for the study of a wide array of subjects ranging from Philadelphia neighborhoods and the life of Marian Anderson to medieval manuscripts and Shakespeare’s plays. In addition, this site gathers together Penn Libraries’ pre-1923 materials publicly available through the Internet Archive as well as Penn-produced scholarship accessible in the ScholarlyCommons.
The Provenance Online Project (POP) makes digital images of provenance evidence contained in books—bookplates, inscriptions, labels, bindings, and other physical attributes indicating ownership—openly available alongside bibliographic and descriptive metadata. The images, currently totaling over 18,000, come not only from Penn’s collections but also from Library Company of Philadelphia, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Princeton University Library with images coming soon from the Newberry Library, the Clark Library at UCLA, the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Getty Research Institute, the Huntington Library, and the Library of Congress.
The SDBM continuously aggregates and updates observations of pre-modern manuscripts drawn from over 13,000 auction and sales catalogs, inventories, catalogs from institutional and private collections, and other sources that document their sales and locations from around the world. This is an interactive resource for finding, indexing, and researching the world’s manuscripts. Members of its user community can become contributing partners in its development by adding new entries, commenting on other users entries, aggregating entries to create “manuscript records,” and helping to build an authority file of persons and institutions associated with the movement of manuscripts across time and place. Video tutorials are available to demonstrate basic database tasks.