This proposal requests funding to present emblem books in a digital environment and to develop a portal for a key genre of Renaissance texts and images. Emblematica Online will fulfill its goals through its three constituent activities: 1) Emblem Digitization: the complete digitization of two premiere emblem collections of world-wide prominence; 2) The German Emblem Databases: the creation of extensive metadata with broad functionality for the German emblems of both institutions in mirror websites; and 3) The OpenEmblem Portal: the development of the portal as an open access research site incorporating book-level metadata from emblem digitization projects worldwide and emblem-level metadata from Illinois and the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB). The OpenEmblem Portal hosted at Illinois will have a mirror portal at the HAB
