The Virtual Abbey Library of St. Gall

With a million dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the CESG Pilot Project intends to digitize the Abbey Library of St. Gall, one of the oldest and most significant manuscript libraries in the world.  "The collection includes material as varied as curses against book thieves, early love ballads, hearty drinking songs and a hand-drawn ground plan for a medieval monastery, drafted around A.D. 820, the only such document of its kind" according to the NY Times.  The project intends to provide online access to all 355 of the manuscripts held by the Abbey Library of St. Gall written before the year 1000 and to develop a new web interface for the online collection.  The Virtual Abbey Library of St. Gall forms one component of a larger successor project, e-codices: The Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, whose goal is to "provide access to the medieval manuscripts of Switzerland through a virtual library".  [RJ]