MORE MANUSCRIPT DIGITIZING at the College of Saint Benedict/St. John’s University:

Fr. Columba Stewart travels the world
September 19th, 2008 by Tan Tuohy (The Record)

By Britta Kolb

Tucked away near the Alcuin Library is a hidden resource of historical wealth. The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library houses 30 million photographically preserved pages from 100,000 manuscripts, found in 270 libraries all over the world. Buried among the chaos of books and research is the office of Fr. Columba Stewart, OSB, the man behind the scenes.

Fr. Stewart (or “Just Andy,” as his family members call him), earned a degree from Harvard, attended graduate school at Yale and received his doctorate from the University of Oxford. He has been the executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library since 2003. During that time, Fr. Stewart has expanded HMML’s core mission of digitizing and archiving manuscript images from two preservation sites to 22, and there is no slowing down the progress being made. HMML now works in Lebanon, Syria, Ukraine, India, Malta, Italy and other regions in the Middle East kept quiet for security reasons.

Having traveled frequently to HMML’s many different sites abroad, Fr. Stewart has a lot of work ahead of him. Three of the places that need urgent attention are Iraq, Ethiopia and Georgia, where HMML will make a preliminary visit this October. The Ethiopian connection is a long-standing one, dating to the early 1970s.

“We have a collection of nearly 9,000 Ethiopic manuscripts at HMML, but many more are at risk in Ethiopia and need to be digitally preserved and catalogued so they are accessible to all who seek to understand what those ancient stories can teach us,” Fr. Stewart said.

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Bring it on!