Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO)

Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) will be an online searchable database of encoded semi-diplomatic transcriptions of all Folger manuscripts from the period 1500-1700, starting with English-language manuscripts. Initial funding comes from a three-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Work began December 1, 2013.

Background

Most people can’t read secretary hand efficiently and accurately enough to be able to include unedited manuscript sources in their research. As a result, an important part of the historic record remains largely untapped.

Future

Texts will be both human-readable and machine-actionable, encoded in TEI P5 and searchable in both normalized and original spelling. Deeper analysis will be available via an application programming interface (API), and the corpus will be expandable by other institutions who want to use the software and be part of a federated search.