Lewis and Gibson Digital Library

A collaborative project of the UCLA Library and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford to publish an online digital library of the work of Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, two Victorian sisters who traveled to St. Petersburg, Jerusalem, and Sinai in the late 19th century and photographed Syriac and Christian Arabic manuscripts.

For some of these manuscripts, the negatives preserve a more legible image than is now discernible from the manuscripts themselves. This is especially true in one very high-profile case: a Syriac palimpsest of the Four Gospels dating from the 4th century and part of the library of St. Catherine’s. The sisters treated the folios of this palimpsest with a chemical agent that at the time made the under-text more legible, but over the years has darkened the folios so that the under-text is nearly invisible. A lesser portion of the negatives are ethnographic and feature scenes of Bedouin and monastic life from the time.

These negatives are of interest to a number of scholars in North America and Europe but due to their chemical instability the Bodleian Library does not allow access. Digitization of the nitrate film will preserve these images for the future, and faciliate access to scholars worldwide.