MASTER: The partners

The following description of the MASTER project's partners was written for the Centre for Technology and the Arts (the predecessor to the Centre for Textual Studies) in 1999 and indicates the project's pan-European scope and comprehensiveness.

The full partners in the MASTER project, who are contracted to take part in the workpackages and to contribute staff time and other resources in return for European Union funding, are:

The Centre for Technology and the Arts, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. Role: Coordinating Partner DMU-CTA will contribute its expertise: in digital library systems (specifically, through its partnership with IBM in the DMU/IBM digital library project); in software development for network retrieval and electronic publishing (building on work done in the past with Cambridge University Press and other agents); in project management (from experience of running several major EU and other projects); and in standards development. Team leader: Dr Peter Robinson. He is Director for the Centre for Technology in the Arts. He is joint general editor of the Canterbury Tales Project, which is pioneering the integration of computer-readable transcriptions, collations, and digitized images in complex critical editions. He is technical adviser to Cambridge University Press and has been instrumental in the publication of several CD-ROMs for the Press. He is developer of the text-editing program Collate, now used in many large-scale critical editing projects around the world. He has acted as a consultant and reviewer to many imaging and text-editing projects, in the UK and abroad.

Royal Library of the Netherlands. Role: Partner The Royal Library will contribute the expertise developed in manuscript cataloguing, and especially its highly-sophisticated catalogue of 3000 Dutch illuminated manuscripts: this catalogue already exists in machine-readable database form and will be the core of KB’s contribution to the project. Team leader: Anne Korteweg, Curator of Medieval Manuscripts. She studied art history in Utrecht, Amsterdam and Munich and wrote a dissertation on Ottonian book illumination. She is director of the A.W. Byvanck Working Group, a group of art historians and medievalists that is preparing an inventory of all illuminated manuscripts in public collections in The Netherlands together with a Census of illuminated manuscripts from the Northern Netherlands in collections in the whole world.

L'Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes. Role: Partner IRHT will contribute the knowledge gained in acquisition of some 55,000 microfilms of manuscripts and in building a computer database record (MEDIUM) of all these microfilms: IRHT’s knowledge of database systems and design for efficient entry of these will be key to WP 4, which IRHT will lead. Team keader: Elisabeth Lalou is sous directeur of the IRHT. She is ‘ingenieur de recherche’ of the CNRS and responsible for the data base MEDIUM (on mss). She is also secretary of The Medieviste et l'Ordinateur.

Arnamagnaean Institute, Copenhagen. Role: Partner AMI will contribute expertise in the making of manuscript records for the medieval Scandinavian scholarly community; it will draw on its contacts throughout that community to promote MASTER; it is committed to making records of all 3000 medieval vellum Old Norse manuscripts to the MASTER standard and contributing these to the demonstrator. Team leader: Matthew Driscoll. He is a full time member of the Institute's staff, and is involved in a number of projects to do with the digitisation and text-encoding of medieval Icelandic manuscripts, principally through his membership in the Netværk til elektronisk behandling af nordiske middelalderhåndskrifter, a body comprising scholars from the Universities of Copenhagen, Göteborg, Bergen, Oslo and Reykjavík. He is the author of a number of scholarly editions and monographs, and holds degrees from the University of Oxford and Háskóli Íslands in Reykjavík.

Humanities Computing Unit, University of Oxford. Role: Partner OU will contribute: expertise in standards development gained through its leadership of the European branch of the TEI since 1989; the software and particularly SGML authoring skills developed in the Humanities Computing Unit, in which its MASTER involvement will be based; and experience in creating SGML manuscript records acquired during the Celtic Manuscrpts project. Team leader: Lou Burnard. He is head of the Humanities Computing Unit and will lead the work package on standards documentation. He is European Editor of the Text Encoding Initiative, and so responsible for the current and future shape of the TEI’s recommendations for the encoding and description of manuscript encoding in digital form. He has worked for many years on the problems of encoding, storing, describing, analysing, and preserving scholarly resources in digital form, most notably in setting up the Oxford Text Archive. He has also worked as system designer for a number of small and not so small database projects at Oxford and elsewhere.

National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague. Role: Partner NLP will contribute: its experience in cataloguing manuscripts, including many records already in machine-readable form; its wide contacts with other C&EE manuscript archives, especially in the Dissemination WP which NLP will lead; and specialist experience in digitization through its involvement in the UNESCO Memoria Mundi project.