• The John Rylands University Library
• About us
• Projects
  • Alan Gilbert Learning Commons
  • Main Library toilet refurbishment
  • First Impressions
  • MaDAM
  • AHRC Rylands Cairo Genizah Project
  • Environmental Champions project
  • St Mary's Church Library
  • StORe: Source-to-Output Repositories

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Current projects

• Alan Gilbert Learning Commons
  Named after the late Alan Gilbert, former President and Vice-Chancellor of the University, the Learning Commons will offer our students a flexible, ultra-modern and stimulating learning space. Managed by the JRUL it will be open 24/7 and feature a host of cutting edge technology.

• MiSS
  This project will deliver a Research Data Management Infrastructure at the University of Manchester, including a Research Data Management Policy, together with a supporting Service and the necessary human infrastructure to provide for the Research Data Management needs across the institution.  MiSS builds on the previous experience of the MaDAM project and runs from October 2011 to March 2013.

• Institutional Repository Project

  This project aims to establish Institutional Repository Services for the University of Manchester. These services will offer members of the university a means of storing, managing and disseminating their scholarly works.

Completed projects

• First Impressions

  This project, funded by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) aims to highlight the significance of the early years of printing - and to make the Library's remarkable collections of early printed books more accessible through public events, workshops and new resources.

• Digitising the Koran of Kansuh al-Ghuri

  Technology is to enable scholars for the first time to study a complete manuscript of one of the world’s most important and largest Korans. Experts at the John Rylands Library are using digital technology and the internet to reunite the 470 page Rylands Koran of Kansuh al-Ghuri with two missing leaves, discovered in the 1970s at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin.

  Up to now, scholars have been unable to study the precious items - thought to be at least 500 years old – because they are too fragile. But now, the reunited digitised resource will be freely available for research, teaching and learning using Turning the Pages technology on a dedicated website.

  The project has been funded by The Islamic Manuscript Association -  an international non-profit organisation dedicated to protecting Islamic manuscript collections and supporting people who work with them.

• The Shahnama Project

  2010 marks the millennium of the Shahnama, Ferdowsi's epic Persian poem. To commemorate the occasion, The Islamic Manuscript Association (TIMA) has sponsored the John Rylands University Library, The University of Manchester to digitise a complete, illustrated Shahnama manuscript, dating from the Safawid period. The high resolution images are now freely accessible for purposes of research, teaching and learning via the Rylands digital image collections.

  Many digitisation projects concentrate on the highly visual, i.e. the illustrated pages of a manuscript. This project closely adheres to TIMA's ambition to open access to textual resources, offering new opportunities for codicology and textual criticism.

• The Rylands Cairo Genizah Project

  The Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded the Library in June 2006 a grant of over £361,000 to digitise and catalogue the Rylands Genizah.

  The two main objectives of the AHRC Rylands Cairo Genizah Project were to photograph both recto and verso of more than 11,000 fragments and to provide the images with their catalogue descriptions.

  This resulted in the creation of an online image collection holding at least 22,000 images that are now available through the John Rylands University Library website as part of a searchable and browseable catalogue.

• Main Library - Blue Ground refurbishment

  In 2009 the ground floor of the Main Library underwent a total refurbishment. This was instrumental in making the Main Library more customer-friendly, its services more responsive, and giving more emphasis to strategic growth of collections in line with the University's developing teaching, learning and research agendas.

• In the bigynnyng: The Manchester Middle English Digital Library

  The John Rylands Library received funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in October 2008 to digitise our internationally important collection of over forty Middle English manuscripts.

  The manuscripts include key works of medieval literature, numerous copies of the New Testament translated into English by John Wycliffe, the fourteenth-century radical and church reformer, and copies of the Brut, the medieval chronicle of the history of Britain. The images now form part of the Rylands Medieval collection and are searchable on the website.

• Complex Archive Ingest for Repository (CAIRO) Project

  The John Rylands University Library worked with the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the Wellcome Library on the JISC-funded Cairo Project, which ran for 18 months to the end of March 2008.

  The Cairo Project aimed to develop a software tool for successfully ingesting such complex collections - along with basic descriptive, preservation and relationship metadata - into a preservation repository.

  Cairo is a key building block in the participating institutions' strategy to develop digital repository architectures which can support the development of digital collections over the long-term.

• Unlocking the Rylands

  The the most extensive and important building programme since the opening of the Library in 1900, Unlocking the Rylands was a multimillion pound project that began in 2003. It involved a new entrance wing to house a range of modern visitor facilities and to provide life access to all public areas, programme of repairs and conservation to the original 1890s building, new exhibition galleries and improved collections and reader facilities. The building reopened in 2007.

• Source to Output Repositories (StORe)

  This project is part of a broader Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) initiative to help the learning and research community to set up and use digital repositories. The John Rylands University Library was one of seven partners that took part in this project.