Hill Monastic Manuscript Library

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) is a non-profit organization located at and sponsored by Saint John's Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota. HMML’s mission is to identify, digitally photograph, catalog, and archive the contents of manuscripts belonging to threatened communities and to make the copies available to users around the world through online catalogs. Since its founding in 1965, HMML has partnered with 540 libraries and archives to photograph more than 140,000 manuscript books dating from the ancient to early modern eras, totaling some 40,000,000 handwritten pages. HMML serves three constituencies: communities or libraries with endangered manuscript collections; scholars who research manuscript and textual history; and the non-specialist general public interested in the transmission of human knowledge and artistic creativity in manuscript form. In October 2015, HMML launched a new and comprehensive online resource for manuscript studies, vHMML or “Virtual HMML." at www.vhmml.org. A crucial extension of vHMML, vHMML Reading Room, went live at the end in the summer of 2016: https://www.vhmml.org/readingRoom/. vHMML Reading Room gives registered users access to HMML’s photographic manuscript archives from around the world. The initial collections available in vHMML Reading Room include representative samples of HMML’s diverse microfilm and digital resources, including images from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India. Highlights include manuscripts from Iraq and the famed Timbuktu manuscripts of Mali. Over 6,000 complete manuscripts in thirty languages are now in vHMML Reading Room. vHMML Reading Room lets users search for manuscripts by country, repository, author, language, genre, date, features, city or even script. Even uncataloged collections will be hosted in vHMML Reading Room, lowering all barriers to scholarly access. Users can contribute cataloging metadata using a simple tool only a click away. Researchers can view a highly-zoomable single page or view the manuscript as a larger whole. In addition to its manuscript collections, HMML holds works of art and rare printed books from the Middle Ages to the present and is home to The Saint John's Bible, the first handwritten and illuminated Bible to have been commissioned by a Benedictine Abbey since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Since 2003, Columba Stewart, OSB, a monk of Saint John's Abbey, has served as HMML's executive director. HMML is located in the Alcuin Library, designed by Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer.