The original Parker on the Web site launched in October of 2009 as one of the first full-library manuscript digitization projects. We learned a great deal from the first phase of the project: how people want to work with manuscripts online, what types of descriptive information are most used, how projects built in a silo without the ability to interoperate with other collections fail to provide our users the experience they really need, among other important lessons.

In 2015 we began work on Parker 2.0. This allowed us to fulfil a promise to our initial funders that we would migrate the project platform at least once in a ten-year period, and to re-think long-term use and sustainability for the fabulous Parker materials. We were able to become a part of the tremendous community developing the International Image Interoperability Framework and associated software solutions which allowed us to begin to envision a vast network of shared resources online for manuscript study.

Parker 2.1 incorporated the new Mirador 3.0 viewer with new features which allow us to continue to encourage creative and co-operative research projects and tools and to allow much broader use and re-use of the Parker manuscript images. The site will be continually updated, and we encourage use of these materials in transcription and annotation projects and we hope that those projects will consider contributing information back to the site so that we can continually provide improvements in terms of manuscript descriptions, better search and discovery options, and an opportunity to highlight the use of these materials.

Parker 2.2 provided a complete overhaul of the descriptive metadata for the project. Parker 2.1 had selected for the most searched fields as part of the migration to a new platform. Parker 2.2 provides access to the full searchable descriptive metadata from the Parker 1.x phase of the project. Future phases will work on enhancing this metadata to provide more accurate and useful descriptions.

What's Happening at Parker on the Web

Please join our mailing list if you would like updates and information as the site is improved and new opportunities to interact with the collection arise.

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Many people have contributed to the multi-year effort that is represented by the Parker 2.0 site.

Many thanks for the feedback and suggestions provided by the following group during the development phase of Parker 2.0:

Improvements to the site and its functionality have continued since the official launch of Parker 2.0 in January of 2018. Our thanks to the following contributors for their work to make Parker on the Web the best it can be.