The Virtual Reading Room - Consortial Access to Digitized Literary and Poetry Collections

The Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University has received a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a technical and policy framework for a virtual reading room. The primary focus is literary manuscript collections, specifically the papers of Irish poets.

Goals​  

The primary goal of the proposed work during this two-year grant period is to plan, pilot, protoype, and assess a virtual reading room that enables shared virtual access to copyrighted materials held by Emory, as a model that solves the current limitations of access to shared collections. 

To accomplish this, we will: 

• Develop and deepen partnerships with key repositories in Ireland, including the National Library of Ireland and Queens University Belfast.  

• Establish an approach for uniting split collections.  

• Identify tactics to build capacity within Emory Libraries for large-scale manuscript digitization and for the operationalization of digital access in a sustainable manner. 

• Develop a deeper understanding of user needs and experience to ensure the virtual reading room model meets researchers’ needs, including researchers using computational methods to interact with collections and metadata. 

• Pilot and test a functional prototype drawing upon Emory’s extensive Irish poetry collections, specifically, the Seamus Heaney papers, which are divided between Rose Library and the National Library of Ireland. 

• Assess the pilot, generate recommendations to guide further implementation or future technology development at Emory or beyond, and share these findings with relevant professional communities.