In partnership with the Rare Book Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries are pleased to announce the 5th Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age. This year's symposium considers the role of the manuscript in organizing and classifying knowledge. Like today's electronic databases, the medieval manuscript helped readers access, process, and analyze the information contained within the covers of a book. The papers presented at this symposium will examine this aspect of the manuscript book through a variety of topics, including the place of the medieval library in manuscript culture, the rise and fall of the 12th-century commentary tradition, diagrams, devotional practice, poetics, and the organization and use of encyclopedias and lexicons.The symposium begins Friday evening at the Free Library of Philadelphia with a keynote address by William Noel, the newly appointed Director of the Special Collections Center and the Schoenberg Institute of Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and moves to the Penn campus on Saturday.

Special exhibitions of manuscripts will be on view at both institutions.

Participants include:

Katharine Breen, Northwestern University

Mary Franklin-Brown, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Vincent Gillespie, University of Oxford

Alfred Hiatt, Queen Mary, University of London

William Noel, University of Pennsylvania

Sara S. Poor, Princeton University

Eric Ramirez-Weaver, University of Virginia

Yossef Schwartz, Tel Aviv University & The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania

Emily Steiner, University of Pennsylvania

Sergei Tourkin, McGill University

For program and abstracts, see: http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/lectures/ljs_symposium5_program.html.