Henry Walters' Library Online's Page

It's a red-letter day for the Walters Art Museum and Henry Walters' Library Online! We made the front page of the Baltimore Sun! The article describes the musuem's project to digitize the Islamic manuscript collection and even includes an action shot of Ariel and a quote from Diane, as well as lots of discussion with our new assistant curator of manuscripts Amy Landau. Everyone on the team is really pleased, and so is the museum's director. Have a look at the article; we're off to celebrate!… Continue

Hello from Henry Walters' Library Online! It's been a while since we last posted, and that's because we've been busy. All summer we've been digitizing away with very good results. We've broken the "40 barrier," meaning that more than 40 manuscripts now exsist as full digital surrogates with accompanying metadata that conforms to the highest international standards for digital preservation. It also means that we've generated a lot of data, which is slowly but surely making its way to the outside… Continue

The Henry Walters Library Online Project has been moving along. Lately, we've been chewing our way through several meaty projects, including correcting some inconsistancies in our existing metadata and imaging W.658, a beautiful 17th-century book of cartography written by Piri Reis, an Ottoman-Turkish admiral and geographer.

The Piri Reis is a breathtaking manuscript (we'll post pix here soon), full of detailed maps that let the imagination wander to far-off exotic lands. But it is also a looon… Continue

It's a rainy day today in Baltimore--tucked away in our little corner of the Walters Art Museum we can only see the outside from the skylights outside our lab door, and when it rains (or snows) it gives the place the feeling of being cocooned in. This, unfortunately, results in sleepy afternoons! (Don't worry, boss, our productivity is still holding steady.)

The Henry Walters' Library Online project is situated in the Asian art wing of the museum, in a little room that used to be a gallery of T… Continue

It's happy days for the Henry Walters' Library Online. We've just received our new camera upgrade and everything appears to be working as it should. We're now shooting with a 33-megapixel camera (that's 33 million pixels!!!) It's a large-format camera body with a digital back and a 120mm lens, all custom-designed and built by Stokes Imaging in Texas to go with their software.

So far things are going great, which is a big relief. We had tried to install this camera a few months ago and the image… Continue