MESA (Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance)

= Aims = MESA (Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance) is an initiative to federate people and resources: 1° it is a community of scholars, librarians, and students developing and using digital resources; 2° it is a website that federates disparate collections and projects. This website will provide a search across various types of resources spanning the disciplines, geographical areas, and temporal spans that make up the Middle Ages, in the broadest sense.

MESA serves two related purposes:
 * to develop a federation of digital medieval resources
 * to provide peer review for scholarly digital projects in all areas of medieval studies.

= Organisation = MESA co-Directors are Dot Porter (Indiana University Bloomington) and Timothy Stinson (North Carolina State University).

MESA joins with Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online, 18thConnect, and the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn) project as a node of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC). ARC is a developing organization, centered at Texas A&M University and directed by Laura Mandell, which serves to provide support for the constituent nodes. This support includes coordination, sustainability, and scalability by providing shared infrastructure - including development of the COLLEX platform and maintenance of a shared catalog including metadata from objects represented in all the nodes.

After a one-year planning grant, the Mellon Foundation has awarded the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA) a three-year implementation grant in June 2012.

= Tasks = During the second half of 2012, the first group of 12 resources will be loaded into the MESA website. The site will launch with those resources in late 2012. At the same time the team will be developing its procedures and policies for including other resources in the site.

Anyone can suggest projects to include in MESA and contact the co-directors.

= Sources = MESA federation blog Press Release from NCSU