St. John's Hill Museum & Manuscript Library receives $1.4 million grant

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John's University received more than $1.4 million in a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support its mission to preserve and share the world's handwritten heritage. 

The grant will fund a three-year project to catalog 53,000 digitized manuscripts and create an online database of authors and titles originating from underrepresented or little-known literary traditions, according to a news release issued by the university Tuesday. 

“Our agency is proud to be a leading funder of this vital project,” said Jon Parrish Peede, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. “Generations of international scholarship will spring from this meticulous cataloging initiative.”

The grant will support the work of seven catalogers and metadata experts to make manuscripts available online to scholars worldwide. The documents include Christian and Islamic handwritten books and scrolls often endangered by weather, war and civil unrest.