(Apologies for cross-posting)
We are very pleased to announce that, following a one-year planning grant, the Mellon Foundation has awarded the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) a three-year implementation grant.
MESA serves two related purposes: to develop a federation of digital medieval resources, and to provide peer review for scholarly digital projects in all areas of medieval studies. MESA is a federation both in the sense of a community - of scholars, librarians, and students developing and using digital resources - and as a website that federates disparate collections and projects. The website will provide a search across various types of resources spanning the disciplines, geographical areas, and temporal spans that make up the Middle Ages, in the broadest sense.
MESA joins with Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online (www.nines.org), 18thConnect (www.18thconnect.org), and the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) project as a node of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC). ARC is a developing organization, centered at Texas A&M University and directed by Laura Mandell, which serves to provide support for the constituent nodes. This support includes coordination, sustainability, and scalability by providing shared infrastructure - including development of the COLLEX platform and maintenance of a shared catalog including metadata from objects represented in all the nodes.
During the second half of 2012, we will be loading the first group of 12 resources into the MESA website. The site will launch with those resources in late 2012. At the same time we will be developing our procedures and policies for including other resources in the site. We have already started compiling a list of projects and collections that we would like to include in MESA in the second phase of the project (after the initial launch). If you have a project that you would like to see included in MESA, please contact us.
MESA Co-Directors
Dot Porter, Indiana University Bloomington Timothy Stinson, North Carolina State University
MESA federation blog: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/mesa/ Press Release from NCSU: http://web.ncsu.edu/abstract/technology/wms-medieval-online/
-- *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Dot Porter (MA, MSLS) Digital Medievalist, Digital Librarian Email: dot.porter@gmail.com *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*