Hey everyone, I have some updates regarding my work projects and the state of medieval things.
First, my main work project. I have been indexing all cemeteries, mausoleums, and known burial sites in my home county. This project has taken two years and is finally coming to a close very soon. The project is in two parts-- a website and a physical book, and within the last couple of weeks I have finished the first draft of the book. My Canva project for the book is currently at 286 pages. Here's a sample:
I'll make a full post officially announcing the project's launch as soon as it's ready and I have the go ahead from my supervisor. This project is why I've been so busy in the last few years and I'm happy to finally see the end product. It's already helped patrons and I've even been consulted by the Indiana State Library for information.
My second work project will be exciting for those Civil War buffs (of whom I used to be one, actually) out there. A local collector has lent us his collection of photographs of soldiers from our county and we're in the process of scanning them. As of this post, we're up to 120 photographs scanned. Once the scanning is completed, we'll upload them to our online photo archive for everyone to enjoy.
Now for some medieval news. If you've kept an eye on digital humanities, you probably know that last year in October, 2023, the British Library was hit with a cyber attack that took down their online digitized manuscripts and other functions. I'm happy to say that as of this month, the British Library has got 1000 manuscripts back up. You can view them here. I'm not sure what their logic in choosing those 1000 is, since it doesn't include some of their most famous works, such as the Beowulf manuscript (Cotton Vitellius A. xv) or the Gawain manuscript (Cotton Nero A.x.). Nor does it include the manuscript I study, Harley MS. 682, the English poetry of Charles d'Orleans. It may be that these manuscripts were the first to be recovered, I don't believe the BL has made a statement on why these are the ones up. However, it's still a relief and the manuscripts that are now available are great. Now if only they would offer PDFs of their manuscripts like the BnF does...
That's it for my update today. Next time I have another grab bag of NetGalley reviews, but after that I'll post my review of my new e-reader, as well as a post about my favorite video game series (I promise, this series is very on theme for what I study).
Until then, take care of yourself.
