The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has granted the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland', U.S., $265,000 for a three-year project to digitize, catalog and distribute 113 illuminated medieval manuscripts from Flanders, present-day northeastern France and Belgium, Artdaily reports.

This project, Imaging the Hours: Creating a Digital Resource of Flemish Manuscripts, will digitize 45,000 pages of text with over 3,000 pages of illumination from the 13th through 16th centuries. A highlight will be the digitization of a collection of 80 Books of Hours - prayer books of personal devotion - which were the “bestsellers” of the Middle Ages, often sumptuously illuminated in gold and painted by masters of the time.

“Just as the Walters provides access without admission fee to our permanent collection, we are also making it available as part of our public mission. The museum is grateful to the NEH for its continued generous financial support allowing us to provide a free worldwide online resource of preservation-quality, digital manuscript surrogates to anyone with an Internet connection,” said Walters Director Gary Vikan. The NEH’s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant allows institutions to preserve and provide access to collections essential to scholarship, education and public programming in the humanities.

This grant allows the museum to continue its ambitious initiative to create, preserve and make accessible fully cataloged digital surrogates of its manuscripts. This initiative began in 2008 with a $307,500 NEH Preservation and Access Grant to digitize its Islamic manuscripts and continues with a second NEH grant of $315,000 for Parchment to Pixel: Creating a Resource of Medieval Manuscripts, to digitize the museum’s Armenian, Byzantine, Dutch, English, Ethiopian and German manuscripts.

To date, the Walters has taken 79,319 images of 112 Islamic manuscripts and 105 Parchment to Pixel manuscripts.