Niarchos Foundation awards grant to the Gennadius Library for digital presentation of its treasures
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation has awarded to the Gennadius Library a generous grant of more than € 100,000 to create online presentations of some of its most important holdings in order to make them accessible to a wider public in virtual form. Some of the most valuable treasures of the Gennadius Library will be presented online using the award-winning Turning-the-pages Content Management System. The system allows the user to browse the digitized material in a user-friendly way like an open book while offering the opportunity to learn about the contents. With 120,000 books, manuscripts, archives, and works of art, the Gennadius Library is a repository of important treasures for the history of Greece from antiquity to the present time. The Library’s primary mission is a scholarly one but new technological means have allowed for an increased access to its materials by an ever broader public. Inspired by the possibilities offered by new programs like Turning-the-Pages at the British Library or the presentation of digitized manuscripts at many great libraries across the world, we are using new technologies to showcase the diversity and depth of our collections.   The project will create several interactive virtual “books/objects” that can be easily browsed by users either onsite or online. Among the materials that will be showcased are: the manuscript isolario of the Florentine Cristoforo Buondelmonti (c. 1420) with maps of all the islands of the Aegean; the Megali Charta of Rigas Ferraios;  a selection of manuscript mathimataria showcasing how young pupils learned grammar through the early nineteenth century; the first printed book in Greek, Konstantinos Lascaris’s Epitome of 1476; a selection of watercolors of Edward Lear; and the paintings by Panagiotis Zographos illustrating the memoirs of general Makrygiannis.   All information will be available in Greek and English and in audio form. At the same time the project will allow the Gennadius Library to achieve the following goals: a. Complete the full, detailed documentation and cataloguing of unique, irreplaceable manuscripts and other rare collections that constitute the “soul” of the library. b. The availability of virtual facsimiles will reduce the handling of fragile manuscripts, paintings, and rare books while they will be easily available to a broader public. c. As research has shown that such presentations will lead users and friends of the Library deeper into the collections. d. The enrichment of the online catalogue of the library with rich descriptions will generate new interest in research.   We are grateful to the Niarchos Foundation for giving us the opportunity to bring this creative new technology in Greece.