The SIMS team consists of a director, two full-time curators and several associate members drawn from other departments and divisions across Penn Libraries, as well as student employees and grant-funded project staff.
Staff Members
Jessie Dummer, Digitization Project Coordinator, Cultural Heritage Computing
Jessie has worked as Digitization Project Coordinator at Penn Libraries since 2010, first for the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image and then for the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies since 2013. She has managed mass digitization projects from image capture to online display. She was an integral part of the team that launched OPenn in 2015 and continues to manage quality control of images and metadata added to OPenn, including those from grant-funded projects like Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis and Manuscripts of the Muslim World. She is also responsible for managing the ingest of digital assets of legacy projects into Penn Libraries’ digital repository. Jessie holds a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from Drexel University and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Doug Emery, Special Collections Digital Content Programmer, Cultural Heritage Computing
Doug Emery oversees data operations for SIMS and provides programming, supervisory, and consultative support for most of SIMS’s digital projects, including the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and Penn Libraries’ OPenn website (http://openn.library.upenn.edu). He is the architect and manager of OPenn, a site that hosts full-resolution images of 6,500 books and manuscripts from thirty-five collections and repository in the U.S. and England, including Penn Libraries’ medieval and renaissance manuscripts and the Lawrence J. Schoenberg collection of manuscripts.
Doug has been working in the technology field since 1998 and on cultural heritage digital projects since 2005, when he began working as data manager for the Archimedes Palimpsest project. Since 2005, he has served at data manager for the multispectral imaging projects of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest, the Livingstone Diaries, the 1507 Waldseemüller Map, and the Sinai Palimpsests, architecting those projects’ digital workflows and datasets. He managed the data for the Walters Art Museum’s manuscript digitization projects and authored its Digital Walters website, prior to his joining Penn Libraries in 2013.
Doug’s educational background is in religious studies, English and American literature, and languages and literature of the Ancient Near East.
Mitch Fraas, Director of Special Collections & Research Services
Mitch Fraas is Curator, Special Collections at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He holds doctoral and master’s degrees in history from Duke University and earned his bachelor’s degree at Boston College. His doctoral dissertation examined the legal culture of British India in the 17th and 18th centuries. He has been a fellow of the Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin. In addition to the history of law and imperialism, he is especially interested in the history of printing and the book and in the digital humanities, as well as the future of scholarly publishing and copyright.
Jonah Greebel, Editorial Assistant, Manuscript Studies
Jonah Greebel is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his M.A. in English Literature from Fordham University (2018) and his B.A. in Creative Writing and Religious Studies from the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter College (2016). His research focuses on both the history and representation of popular rebellion and dissent in the late-medieval and early modern periods (c. 1381-1642). In pursuit of such interests, his work engages with English chronicle writing, pastoral poetry, and the politics and poetics of early modern drama.Jonah has served as co-coordinator for the Premodern Studies Working Group (formerly Med/Ren) from 2021-2022. He is currently the editorial assistant for Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies.
Nicholas Herman, Lawrence J. Schoenberg Curator, SIMS
Nicholas is the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Curator at the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies and Medieval Studies Librarian at Penn Libraries. His teaching and research focus on manuscript illumination and its intersection with other media in fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Europe.
Nicholas received his doctorate in 2014 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, with a dissertation focusing on the French Renaissance court painter, Jean Bourdichon. Prior to arriving at Penn in 2016, Nick has held fellowships at the Université de Montreal, the Courtauld Institute of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 2007 to 2010, he worked in the department of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. He has contributed to numerous catalog and exhibition projects in Europe and North America, and has published articles in Word and Image, Burlington Magazine, Journal of the History of Collections, Manuscripta, and Gesta. His books include Le livre enluminé, entre représentation et illusion (2018), Making the Renaissance Manuscript: Discoveries from Philadelphia Libraries (2020), and, co-written with Anne-Marie Eze, Bourdichon’s Boston Hours (2021). In Spring 2020 he was Craig Hugh Smyth Fellow at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti.
Amey Hutchins, Manuscripts Cataloging Librarian, Special Collections Processing
As a manuscripts cataloging librarian, Amey describes manuscripts from the ninth to the nineteenth century for Penn’s online catalog and provides metadata for other SIMS projects, with the goal of making the manuscripts visible to a wide audience. She also is a member of the teaching team for the SIMS summer course in manuscripts skills for graduate students. Amey has an A.M. degree in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.L.I.S. degree from Drexel University.
Dot Porter, Curator of Digital Research Services
As Curator of Digital Research Services in the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Dot Porter participates in a wide-ranging digital humanities research and development team within the context of a special collections department. Dot’s projects focus on the digitization and visualization of medieval manuscripts.
Dot holds Master’s degrees in Medieval Studies and Library Science and started her career working on image-based digital editions of medieval manuscripts. She has worked on a variety of digital humanities projects over a decade-long career, focusing on materials as diverse as ancient texts and Russian religious folklore, providing both technical support and scholarly expertise. From 2010 until March 2013, she was the Associate Director for Digital Library Content and Services at the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, where she led in planning and implementing new services to support librarians and faculty in the creation of digital projects. She has also worked for the Digital Humanities Observatory at the Royal Irish Academy, and the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities at the University of Kentucky. @leoba on Twitter.
Sean Quimby, Associate University Librarian & Director of the Jay I. Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts
Sean leads a staff of 50 curators, archivists, librarians and researchers and oversees special collections that comprise 300,000 printed books and nearly ten million pieces of manuscript material within the University’s seven million-volume library system.
He came to the Penn Libraries from Columbia University, where he was Director of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library. At Columbia, he worked to acquire, preserve and activate media-rich archives, such as those of countercultural icon and free-form radio host Bob Fass, Dance Theater of Harlem founder Arthur Mitchell, and playwright Tony Kushner. An experienced fund-raiser, he has led numerous projects funded by private donations as well as grant-giving bodies like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities.
Quimby began his career at Stanford, where he oversaw the papers of polymath and technological utopian Buckminster Fuller. Between 2006 and 2014, he was the Senior Director of Special Collections at Syracuse University, where, among other things, he coordinated an international digital initiative on modernist architect Marcel Breuer. He received his training in the history of technology as a Hagley Fellow at the University of Delaware (M.A., 2000) and in library and information science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (M.L.I.S., 2006).
Lynn Ransom, Curator of Programs, SIMS
Lynn Ransom joined Penn Libraries in February 2008 as the Project Manager for the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and is a founding member of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Lynn holds a B.A. in art history from the University of the South and an M.A. and Ph.D. in medieval art history, with an emphasis on manuscript illumination from the University of Texas at Austin.
Before coming to Penn, Lynn held positions in the manuscript collections at the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. She also served as a researcher at the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University. She has published on manuscript illumination of the 13th and 16th centuries. Her current research interests involve the provenance of medieval manuscripts and the history of international manuscript cataloging efforts in the early 20th century.
Lynn has recently overseen the NEH-funded redevelopment of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, as an open-access, user-maintained finding aid for the world’s pre-modern manuscripts. She is the project director of the the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts.
Aili Waller, Undegraduate Outreach Intern, SIMS
Former Staff Members
Emma Cawlfield Thomson, Project Manager, Digital Scriptorium DS 2.0 Redevelopment Project (2018–2021)
Emma began working on the Schoenberg Database in 2011, first as a researcher creating new data and now as the project coordinator, where she approves all new records, manages the internal SDBM authority files, produces instructional content, and helps people use and contribute to the database. On September 1, 2020, she became the Project Manager for the IMLS-funded redevelopment of Digital Scriptorium 2.0. She holds a MS in Library and Information Studies from Florida State University and a BA in Religion from the New College of Florida.
Timothy Hampshire, Assistant, Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (2020–2021)
Tim completed a Post-Bacc and an MA in the History of Art at Penn. He is currently a PhD student at Harvard University.
Aylin Malcolm, Editorial Assistant, Manuscript Studies (2018–2021)
Aylin is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania and the editorial assistant of Manuscript Studies, the journal of the Schoenberg Institute. Having received an MA in English from Ohio State (2016) and a BA&Sc. in Environment from McGill (2014), Aylin is currently working on poetry and scientific writing in the late medieval west. For more information, visit aylinmalcolm.com.
Dennis Mullen, Digitization Specialist, Cultural Heritage Computing (2006-2022)
Dennis worked with the Lawrence J. Schoenberg collection of manuscripts since 2006. As a librarian and web site developer he helped create the original online versions of the manuscripts and developed the first online version of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts. He has also created online exhibitions and catalogs that feature the Schoenberg collection. His more recent responsibilities include designing and maintaining the SIMS website, maintaining the SIMS YouTube channel and editing videos that appear there, and developing touch screen applications and online presentations for the SIMS exhibits here at the Penn Library.
Will Noel, Director (2012–2020)
As founding Director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Will orchestrated its integration with Penn’s broad primary-source holdings and guides the programs to support scholarship in the many disciplines that draw on the Libraries’ rare and unique materials. A specialist in the fields of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman manuscripts, Will came to Penn in 2012 from The Walters Art Museum where he had been Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books since 1997. He is currently the inaugural John T. Maltsberger III ’55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections at Princeton University Library.
Patrick Perkins, Cultural Heritage Programmer, Cultural Heritage Computing (2018-2021)
During his time at Penn, Patrick was principally involved with the development and testing of VCEditor, an innovative, open-access collation modelling and visualization tool.
Kelly Tuttle, Cataloger, Manuscripts of the Muslim World Project (2016–2020)
Kelly holds a PhD in Arabic from Penn, and spent 5 years teaching Arabic after graduation. She has returned to Philadelphia and joined Manuscripts of the Muslim World–a grant-funded project to catalog and digitize the Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish collections at Penn, the Free Library of Philadelphia, other area institutions and Columbia University–as Project Cataloger.
The Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies 
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