This interactive workshop will introduce GEMMS and demonstrate its features. GEMMS, the Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons, is an open-access, group-sourced, bibliographic database of manuscript sermons from the British Isles and North America between 1530 and 1715. GEMMS is intended to make sermon manuscripts more accessible to sermon scholars, non-specialists, and those outside academia, such as genealogists and local historians. Manuscript sermons are valuable for studying a wide range of topics, from literature, religion, and book history, to politics, society, and women. GEMMS allows users to identify relevant manuscript sermons from multiple repositories quickly and easily, which was virtually impossible before. The database includes records for not only sermons and manuscripts, but also for Bible books, and related people and places.
Our new interface has enhanced GEMMS’s search capabilities, enabling users to search any field in the database. GEMMS 2.0 also has improved the ability for users to refine their searches and allow for faceted searching of some fields. For the first time, users will be able to search for sermons with manuscript witnesses, print editions, or digital copies. Users also will be able to more easily search for preachers of a particular denomination and sermons preached in a specified language. Users will be able to quickly refine searches by a variety of criteria, including sermon types, occasions, languages and genres. One of the other new features is the new interface allows users to submit and add their own metadata and enhance existing records by submitting keywords, corrections, and additions. We will show the capabilities of GEMMS by demonstrating a variety of searches, including some suggested by attendees. We also welcome any of your comments on the project.
The workshop will be recorded and posted on the GEMMS YouTube channel after the event.
