Mill Marginalia Online began as an institutional collaboration between Somerville College, Oxford and The University of Alabama. In support of its mission to sustain the University of Oxford’s research and teaching mandates, as well as to promote the College’s historic special collections, Somerville issued a public call, in the November 2014 issue of Somerville Magazine, “to foster research into the annotations and to preserve” the John Stuart Mill Collection. After a close correspondence with Dr. Anne Manuel, the Somerville Librarian and Archivist, Professor Albert Pionke successfully obtained competitively awarded internal funding from the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama for “The Reading Mill,” a project whose deliverables included digital page images of the marginalia found in Mill’s personal copy of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and two dozen other volumes. The technical and project management staff of UA Libraries’ Alabama Digital Humanities Center, then led by Professor Emma Wilson, translated these images and their metadata into a form suitable for inclusion in a database and companion website to allow for faceted searching of the marks and annotations. On the strength of this initial collaboration and in light of the scholarly promise of this initial sampling of verbal and nonverbal marginalia, Manuel at Somerville College and Pionke at the University of Alabama obtained additional funding for the project from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Britain’s National Manuscripts Conservation Trust, and UA’s Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development and College of Arts and Sciences. They also publicized some of the early research results through academic conferences and publications, public relations events, intellectual networks, and news outlets such as the BBC Online, The Conversation, The Guardian, and Newstalk. Dr. Manuel’s role as UK collaborator has since been filled by Sarah Butler, Somerville’s newest Librarian and Head of Information Services, and while UA Libraries has continued to host Mill Marginalia Online, it has ceded its more active project management and technical support roles entirely to Pionke, who has obtained expert assistance, first from the College of Arts and Sciences Office of Educational Technology and most recently from external contractors, aka code ninjas, in Nepal and Tuscaloosa.
