The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is making rare and fragile medieval books available to everyone, thanks to nearly a million dollars in grants. About 79,000 pages of medieval Islamic and Christian orthodox books are now available, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Best of all, the images are available online for free.
The books are too fragile to allow the general public to handle them. Until now, the museum has only displayed a small number of the books at a time, always in a display case with each book open. The public always needed to go to Baltimore to view the books, then they could only see one page. With the digitized images, anyone can stay at home, minimizing travel expenses, and electronically "flip through" every page to read the text and also to see all the art work.
You can read more in an article by Andrea Fujii in the CBS Baltimore web site at http://goo.gl/xdwJ3.
My thanks to Kathy Yelshin for telling me about this story.
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