Come hear about the launch of a multi-national virtual collection of digitized emblem books, providing open, worldwide access to digital facsimiles of 723 Renaissance emblem books containing more than 70,000 individual emblems.

Emblems flourished as a bimedial genre of Renaissance literature with fascinating combinations of texts and images throughout Europe from 1531 (date of the first emblem book) until roughly 1750. Today the University of Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library's own collection of over 730 emblem books and the similarly extensive emblem book collection of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany rank among the largest and finest collections worldwide.

With generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) the project has been able to digitize a majority of books from these two collections and gather these digital facsimiles into a single integrated virtual collection. Emblem scholars worldwide can now access this open and freely available digital collection through the new OpenEmblem Portal, optimized for searching and browsing emblem book materials. When complete, the Emblematica Online collection and the associated OpenEmblem Portal will enable scholars to search for topics represented in emblems across a number of additional emblem book collections, such those of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany; Glasgow University Library; Emblem Project Utrecht; the Bayrische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Getty Research Library, Duke University Library, and, eventually, others.

The Emblematica Online presentation constitutes a formal launch of this online collection. From among the 70,000 individual emblems in the virtual collection, Emblematica Online has created in-depth data for searching and browsing 18,889 individual emblems. We will present interesting examples of emblems contained in the collection, show some of the unique functional features of the OpenEmblem Portal and discuss highlights of both the intellectual and the technical aspects of work to date in digitizing Illinois' collections and making them available alongside emblem books digitized in Wolfenbüttel. Plans for continuing the project's development will also be presented.

The Emblematica Online researchers at the University of Illinois are: Timothy Cole, Myung-Ja Han (co-PIs) , Tom Kilton (Senior Researcher), Jordan Vannoy (Programmer), and Mara Wade (PI).