MESA!!

We are very pleased to announce that, following a one-year planning
grant, the Mellon Foundation has awarded the Medieval Electronic
Scholarly Alliance (MESA) a three-year implementation grant.

MESA serves two related purposes: to develop a federation of digital
medieval resources, and to provide peer review for scholarly digital
projects in all areas of medieval studies. MESA is a federation both
in the sense of a community - of scholars, librarians, and students
developing and using digital resources - and as a website that
federates disparate collections and projects. The website will provide
a search across various types of resources spanning the disciplines,
geographical areas, and temporal spans that make up the Middle Ages,
in the broadest sense.

MESA joins with Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online (www.nines.org),
18thConnect (www.18thconnect.org), and the Renaissance English
Knowledgebase (REKn) project as a node of the Advanced Research
Consortium (ARC). ARC is a developing organization, centered at Texas
A&M University and directed by Laura Mandell, which serves to provide
support for the constituent nodes. This support includes coordination,
sustainability, and scalability by providing shared infrastructure -
including development of the COLLEX platform and maintenance of a
shared catalog including metadata from objects represented in all the
nodes.

During the second half of 2012, we will be loading the first group of
12 resources into the MESA website. The site will launch with those
resources in late 2012. At the same time we will be developing our
procedures and policies for including other resources in the site. We
have already started compiling a list of projects and collections that
we would like to include in MESA in the second phase of the project
(after the initial launch). If you have a project that you would like
to see included in MESA, please contact us.

MESA Co-Directors

Dot Porter, Indiana University Bloomington
Timothy Stinson, North Carolina State University

MESA federation blog: http://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/mesa/
Press Release from NCSU:
http://web.ncsu.edu/abstract/technology/wms-medieval-online/