In view of the quantity and quality of the applications received, and with the approval of the Executive Committee (formerly Coordinating Committee), the CERL Grant Committee decided this year to award two grants instead of one, to a scholar and to a librarian.
A grant was awarded to Francesca Rocchi, a graduate in Latin Palaeography of Rome, La Sapienza University, and with a previous internship experience at the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome, to work within the Special Collections Department of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and under the supervision of Dr Irene Ceccherini, Lyell-Bodleian Research Fellow in Manuscript Studies. The internship entails the transfer into electronic format of the card indexes of Renaissance manuscripts, scribes, and illuminators, prepared by Professor Albinia de la Mare († 2001), who devoted her research life to the study of humanistic script. In this new format the records will be more easily accessible to scholars and will be uploaded to the CERL Thesaurus to increment records on manuscript production, and to support links with the CERL Portal.
A grant was awarded to Thomas Theyssens, a graduate in Early Modern History from the University of Louvain, with a Master in Heritage Management in Libraries from the University of Antwerp, and working experience at Flanders Heritage Library, to work within the Printed Heritage Collections Department of the British Library, and under the supervision of Dr Adrian Edwards. The internship entails adding provenance data on Horace Walpole’s Library.
The second CERL Grant was announced in June 2015 with deadline 15 September 2015. We offered the possibility of applying to a number of internships offered by member libraries (see below). We received 21 applications:
Gender: 4 male, 17 female
Occupation: 9 Librarians; 12 Scholars
Country of residence: 4 Belgium; 1 Germany; 1 France; 6 Italy; 1 Latvia; 1 Netherlands; 1 Poland; 1 Slovenia; 1 Spain; 4 UK.
Grants applied to:
London BL, Walpole provenance: 8
London BL, Chamberlain provenance: 5
Munich BSB, links to watermarks of incunabula in ISTC: 4
London Wellcome, cataloguing incunabula in MEI: 7
London Wellcome, cataloguing 16th-c books: 10
London Wellcome, cataloguing MSS: 4
Oxford Bodleian, De la Mare MSS Index into CT: 7
The Hague, work on STCN: 1
The quality of the applications was very high and the selection was complex. CERL will actively seek supplementary funding to hopefully support a higher number of internships in the years to come.