IN 1997, DIGITAL Scriptorium, a member-supported consortium of American libraries and museums, launched a freely accessible online database of premodern manuscripts housed in collections held by member institutions. Taking advantage of emerging web technologies for publishing digitized images online, the database allowed cross-institutional searching of detailed manuscript descriptions illustrated by a sampling of high-resolution images. Beginning with a partnership between the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University, Digital Scriptorium (henceforth DS) has grown over time to include over forty institutions across the United States, ranging from major institutions with large collections such as Harvard University and the Beinecke Library at Yale University, to smaller institutions with only a handful of manuscripts, such as the Providence Public Library in Rhode Island and Conception Abbey in Missouri. The goal was to provide detailed descriptions and a representative selection of images for every manuscript in the United States, creating, in effect, the first online national union catalogue. Noted for its open-access policy and innovative design and execution, the DS database set a standard for online manuscript description and digitization that later projects would emulate.

Within fifteen years of its launch, however, the infrastructure of the DS platform had become dated and burdensome, both technically and financially. Moreover, cheaper technologies and server space enabled many member institutions to start their own projects to digitize and catalogue manuscript holdings and make them freely available online, thus reducing the incentive for these institutions to maintain an additional record in DS. The DS standards for data entry and image reproduction also discouraged smaller and less-resourced institutions without access to the required scholarly expertise or technical infrastructure from contributing or maintaining records over the long term.