In 1965, Saint John's University took a bold and visionary step with the creation of a new library dedicated to the preservation of priceless manuscripts held in European monasteries and libraries. The holdings of what came to be known as the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library have grown to number more than 90,000 manuscripts on microfilm--nearly 30 million pages. Over the years HMML has filmed broadly, from Sweden to Ethiopia, Germany to Malta. In 2003, HMML began a major Eastern Mediterranean initiative in Lebanon and will soon add manuscripts from Syria and Turkey. Such growth speaks powerfully to the importance of our mission in a part of the world beset by great turmoil and uncertainty.

At the same time HMML was growing, Saint John's received the gift of the Arca Artium collection, building upon its existing collections of rare books and art. In recent years, The Saint John's Bible has become an important project of Saint John's University and of the Abbey. It seems natural that these various entities, dedicated as they are to art, culture, and the spiritual imagination, be organized as one. Accordingly, in 2004 the Saint John's Board of Regents approved new statutes of operation and a new name for HMML, suggesting a welcoming space for visitors to view displays from our art, rare book and manuscript collections and from The Saint John's Bible. Happily, the acronym HMML remains: the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library.

The unique focus of its collections sets HMML apart and makes it pre-eminent in its field. Whether manuscript, printed book, or work of art, each piece in the collection reflects the way humans imagine and communicate what is sacred to them. The collection now ranges from rare books, to original lithographs by Picasso and Chagall on religious subjects, to abstract works meant to inspire spiritual reflection, to a new illuminated Bible for the modern era. Bringing together all of these collections in HMML is a profoundly Benedictine undertaking. For 1,500 years, Benedictines has been committed to glorifying God by creating, caring for, and preserving books, art and architecture of enduring quality and beauty.

HMML's commitment to manuscript preservation remains central to the new HMML. HMML operates more preservation sites now than ever before in its history, and that number continues to increase. Moreover, HMML's movement into digital imaging of our collection creates opportunities for access to manuscripts only dreamed of in the past.

As long as they have existed, manuscripts have been threatened by fire, flood, theft and civil disturbance. Shortly after World War II, a war that had been catastrophic for manuscripts, Pope Pius XII asked Father Colman Barry of Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, about the future fate of manuscripts.

When Father Colman assumed the presidency of Saint John's University, he had already envisioned a plan in which Saint John's Abbey would microfilm the documents housed in Europe, store the microfilms at Collegeville, and make them available to researchers. In 1965 this proposal was presented to the Louis W. and Maud Hill Family Foundation. The Executive Director of the Hill Family Foundation, A.A. Heckman, recognized the enormous possibilities inherent in this proposal to preserve on microfilm the classical and medieval handwritten cultural heritage of western civilization--every text and book written before the invention of printing--and agreed to provide initial funds.

Since its founding in 1965, HMML has sent teams of researchers and technicians to film more than 25 million pages from nearly 90,000 volumes in libraries and archives throughout Europe, the Middle East and East Africa. Today, HMML represents one of the largest and most comprehensive archives of medieval and renaissance sources in the world.

The collection includes substantial holdings from Germany and Austria (including the National Library in Vienna), Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, England, Malta, Ethiopia and smaller collections from other countries. Virtually every subject of knowledge--theology, philosophy, law (canon and civil), music, art, science and medicine, the mechanical arts and the liberal arts--is reflected in this vast collection.

More than a repository of manuscripts, HMML is one of the best research libraries in medieval studies in the country. Scholars from all over the world visit HMML, for short or extended periods, while others contact HMML by mail or e-mail to request copies of microfilmed holdings. Efforts are underway to increase accessibility to the HMML collection through digital means.

The most recent cataloguing achievement of the Hill Library is the production of an online manuscript catalogue. In association with the Electronic Access to Medieval Manuscripts Project, HMML assembled an international team to develop the first electronic manuscript cataloguing standards for document descriptions in both MARC and SGML format. HMML's online catalogue, developed in collaboration with Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, incorporates these standards. An initial catalogue listing of all of HMML microfilmed collections was made available to the public online in December 2000. It is already a vital resource for manuscript and archival research.

HMML long had one of the world's largest collections of incipit files to aid in the identification of texts and authors in the manuscripts they had filmed. This led in the early 1990s to cooperation with l'Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes (IRHT) and Brepols to create In Principio, an essential resource for scholars. The work continues today as new contributors join the project.