DS Holds Annual Meeting in New Haven

During a week of beautiful Fall weather, Digital Scriptorium held its annual board and membership meetings at the Beinecke Library of Yale University in New Haven, CT.  The DS Board of Directors meeting was held on Wednesday October 3^rd, and the annual meeting of the DS membership was held Thursday October 4^th at which there were 17 people in attendance, including representatives and guests from Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Penn, Wellesley, Smith, Ohio State, Fordham, Saint Louis University, the Huntington Library, the Free Library of Philadelphia, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, Western Michigan University, and the Medieval Academy of America.

The annual meeting included several presentations regarding manuscript collections and digital projects. Eric Johnson made a guest presentation about the manuscript collections at the Ohio State University. Debra Cashion of Saint Louis University gave a presentation about information theory and the DS metadata structure, and Lynne Grigsby of UC Berkeley presented new improvements to the DS website. Vanessa Wilkie of the Huntington Library reported on DS membership statistics, and Cherry Williams of UC Riverside led a discussion about the organization's archives and records, which are presently stored in the office of Consuelo Dutschke at Columbia University. There were additional presentations about digital projects by Lynn Ransom of the University of Pennsylvania, Janine Pollock of the Free Library of Philadelphia, and E.C. Schroeder of Yale University.  

Also discussed were options for potential grant funding to rebuild the DS online catalog, questions to include in a forthcoming DS user survey, and plans to create an investment policy in order for DS to accept it first promised gift of $10,000 to begin an endowment or investment fund. The DS Board will continue this work at the mid-year meeting on 09 February 2018, to be held at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA. The next annual meeting of the DS membership will be held on 7 September 2018 at UC Riverside in Riverside, CA, to be preceded by a meeting of the board on September 6th. Riverside was chosen because the DS annual meeting has been held on the east coast for the last four years. At the 07 September 2018 meeting DS will hold elections/re-elections of board members and officers, who are elected to 3-year terms once renewable.

The two days of DS meetings were followed by the Takamiya conference, Making the English Book, held at the Beinecke Library on Friday-Saturday, October 5th-6th. The conference comprised sessions of presentations by international scholars about medieval English manuscripts, including literary works by Chaucer and other Middle-English writers. There was an accompanying exhibition of manuscripts that used the entire exhibition space of the Beinecke galleries, and a banquet was held in honor of professor Toshiyuki Takamiya, who teaches medieval English literature in Japan but was present to introduce the manuscript collection on display and now part of the Beinecke Library collections. Many attending the DS meetings remained in New Haven to attend such an important exhibition, lively conference, and festive event.