We are preparing two new projects for MESA, the first to go with Tier 1 peer review (up until now, new projects have just been added with no review). Per our process document, Tier 1 “consists of affirming that a digital project or resource meets sufficient scholarly and technological standards for inclusion in MESA followed by open review by the user community.” You are our user community! So, please take a minute to look at these projects and reply to this post with any concerns / praise. We also encourage you to join the MESA listserv, through that list you’ll receive a message every time new projects are ready for review. (To subscribe, send an email to mj2@lists.ncsu.edu with the following text in the body of the message: subscribe mesa).

Both of these incoming projects are collections of Middle English. TEAMS Middle English Texts are already indexed in MESA, and adding these will give us a particular strength in Middle English, which is quite exciting. Please share this message with any individuals or groups you think will be interested in this news.

The projects:

Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. This is a longstanding project at the University of Michigan, to present full-text of published editions of Middle English texts. There are a handful of these that we won’t be indexing because of copyright concerns, but we’ve planning to take most of them. MESA will have records for each book, with the full-text indexed for searching.

Website: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/

Digital Index of Middle English Verse. Digital revision of the Index of Middle English Verse (1943) and its Supplement (1965). Records provide first and last lines, scansion, and a list of manuscripts in which each verse is found. MESA will have records for each verse, and for each manuscript, and these records will be linked.

Website: http://www.dimev.net/