Aug 1, 1996 12:00 PM

The Electronic Scriptorium

A thousand years ago, monks labored with quill pens to preserve classical works. Today, monastics are again preserving our collective memory—using keyboards.

Brother Benedict Simmonds using a laptop with a glow around his hood and laptop.

On the South Side of Chicago, where the Monastery of the Holy Cross is tucked into a bleak working-class neighborhood not far from housing projects, check-cashing services, and corner drug dealers, the day begins at 5:30 a.m. as it always does: with a pattern, a code. Five men in white cowled cloaks assemble before the sanctuary, leaning against the choir stalls or kneeling on the cold flagstones. Prayer begins wordlessly, in vaulted silence. Incense from a thousand masses makes the air rich; the spice lightly tingles in my lungs.

As the rising sun fires the colors in the stained glass, the monks begin the "Morning Office," or singing of the Psalms. The voices start abruptly, like an exclamation, filling the quiet to overflowing: combining, harmonizing, separating, recombining in the way monks have praised their God for 1,700 years.

The themes of the 150 Psalms, from the ancient Hebrews, cover it all: rage and sorrow, joy and defeat, hatred and charity. Each morning, and again at noon, dusk, and nightfall, the brothers of the Monks of Jerusalem reach back to this tradition and out to the range of human experience.

But technology, not spirituality, has brought me to the monastery. I've come to observe the postprayer ritual. An hour and a half after morning song, the monks boot up IBM clones with 386 processors. (Only the prior uses a 486.) Silence and order, the constants of monastic life, still dominate, but for the next four hours, they will be punctuated by the hushed whir of hard drives, the clickety cadence of keyboards, the hum of the network server. The office fills what had been the boiler room of the monks' dormitory, or rectory. Here is standard-issue furniture, modular carrels, gray-and-rose wall-to-wall carpet. The silence is occasionally broken to trade tips on software and coding. Typical office stuff.

One by one, each brother is creating MARC records, the Library of Congress standard for machine-readable descriptions of books in libraries. Any library that wants to put its catalog online, or someday make its collection available electronically, must begin with a record like the ones the monks are making: a bundle of fields defining title, author, content, publisher, and so on. The job is simple, electronic piecework. Yet, like the monks' prayers that can gradually stir the soul of even an agnostic, the individual records add up to a much more surprising and greater whole: the books represented by these markers contain the memory of our civilization.

In the mundane work of creating digital records for physical books, the monks are helping to transfer this memory from a printed context into a wired one. In the process, they are becoming wired themselves.

More than a millennium ago, robed monks laboriously copied the works of the classical world onto parchment, preserving them for modern eyes. Today, copying is not so critical. After all, we have OCR scanners that do that flawlessly. In the age of information overload, modern monks and nuns are building something that will be much more important: markers, road maps, the links to the files in the cabinets and the books in the libraries.

In growing numbers, religious orders across the country have taken on this kind of computer work as a replacement for more traditional occupations like distilling brandy or making cheese. Several monastic communities are working together to catalog approximately 2 million photographs in the archives of The New York Daily News; they will soon begin on those of Time magazine. Benedictine monks near Abiquiú, New Mexico, have worked to catalog public and school libraries, and at the Incarnation Priory in Berkeley, California, monks have edited computer files for Readmore, a New York subscription information company. In Lufkin, Texas, cloistered Dominican nuns have digitized records of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. In the past four years, monks and nuns have transferred a dizzying array of information from paper to cyberspace: the medical archives of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, the files of major law firms, the records of government agencies, the recipe collections of Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines, and the catalogs from the Yale University undergraduate library as well as more than 100 smaller ones.

Most of the computer work done by a dozen or so widely scattered monastic communities has been coordinated by The Electronic Scriptorium Ltd., a company that has taken the demands of the commercial world and the benefits of wired life—voicemail, email, FTP—and figured out how to fit them around the structure of monastic life.

Like many good ideas, even many revolutions, today's cyber-scriptorium started almost by accident. In the late 1980s, Edward Leonard, who managed a US$130 million Everex Systems project to automate the federal courts, became restless. Searching for something with greater meaning, Leonard volunteered to work for environmental causes in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. One of those causes was an effort to block the development of a country club on the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The fight allied him with a nearby community of about 30 Cistercian, or Trappist, monks who lived in ascetic contemplation at Holy Cross Abbey. Leonard became fascinated with monasticism, especially the writings of Thomas Merton, the Columbia University trained literary critic who became a contemplative Trappist monk.

Toward the end of the country-club fight, a longtime friend gave the abbey a Novell network with four workstations to help automate the fruitcake business that supported it. The monks were grateful: by the 1990 holiday season, they were struggling to keep track of 15,000 fruitcake sales with file cards and slips of paper. But they had no idea how to set up the computer system. They turned to Leonard, who had been wanting to plot out a new life course. He quit his job and went to work customizing a network for the monks.

After two months, the abbey had its fruitcake system online, but Leonard was no closer to deciding what to do with his life. Some of the brothers said it would be nice if they had something to do in the fruitcake off season. Brother Benedict Simmonds, who had worked in Special Collections at the New York Public Library, said he knew of several libraries that needed help converting their catalogs into a digital format. Brother Benedict had the library experience; the abbey had the computers and educated staff; Leonard had the business know-how. And so, in 1991, The Electronic Scriptorium was born.

Almost immediately, The Scriptorium had more work than Holy Cross Abbey could handle. Within a year, the company was farming out business to three other monasteries. After two years, it was giving work to half a dozen religious communities. The virtuous idea quickly became a virtual corporation: monks in 18 monastic communities across the country were taking orders from a remote office, digitizing the records of libraries, schools, corporations, and government agencies that were likewise scattered across the country.

Leonard, 37, has the business pedigree to make negotiations with such a wide variety of organizations work. Yet he also could be considered something of a corporate renegade. "The bottom line is important, but not the most important," he says. "We have a cause, an overarching reason that drives us." (He claims to have taken a 50 percent pay cut since starting The Scriptorium, learning with his family "to get by on less." He donates a percentage of his annual net to Holy Cross Abbey, because he thinks he should: the monks, after all, gave him the idea for The Scriptorium.)

Despite, or perhaps because of, these slightly iconoclastic corporate values, The Electronic Scriptorium has grown rapidly, grossing about $400,000 within its first year and $2 million in 1995. Lay workers were hired to pick up the slack from the monks during crunch periods. The clientele is now global, including foreign agencies like the Panama Canal Commission.

"This work fits into their schedule. And it is intellectual, engaging work that is historically compatible," says Leonard. "The monks are able to follow their traditions, while at the same time adding to modern society."

Because of the Internet, the monks can "add to modern society" from a place of near total physical isolation. Amid arid canyons of dusty red and burnt orange, The Monastery of Christ in the Desert lies 13 miles from the paved road and about 30 miles from Abiquiú, a small New Mexico town that was home to artist Georgia O'Keefe. Here about two dozen monks live a life of prayer and meditation. Theirs was among the first monasteries to do work with The Scriptorium. Their Christ in the Desert page is perhaps the most beautiful on the Web, vibrant with the colors and style of medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Technically savvy, the monastery is self-consciously and completely cut off from the world. The monks have only one cellular phone for emergencies. Postal service is in town, many miles away. No phones, no awkward interruptions disturb their peace.

Well, they're physically cut off. The monks operate their computers with solar power and communicate with the outside primarily via email, voicemail, and fax. The Monastery of Christ in the Desert has also started designing Web pages for others, with fees starting at $50 an hour.

The New Mexico monks hark back to their predecessors in the Middle Ages who copied from papyrus scroll to parchment page. As early as Saint Augustine in the third century CE, most ecclesiastic leaders and monastic communities oversaw "scriptoria" that copied essays, histories, plays, Bibles, and Psalters. Surrounded by sheaves of parchment, bottles of ink, and quill pens, monks sat on stools at long tables that sloped upward like lecterns. The work was divided on an assembly-line basis. Scribes cut pages to size and copied out the text in the squared-off, ornate style that survives today in the Gothic typeface. "Miniators" or "rubricators" added the red-lettered headings, or rubrics, and the elaborate initials and flourishes for which medieval manuscripts are still famous. (The scriptoria's approach to page formatting—drop caps and the division of text into columns, for instance—survives in today's desktop publishing.)

The success of such medieval knowledge banks turned monks into the data processors of their day. They gathered information, copied it, and then redistributed it. When Visigoths and Huns were sacking and burning the great libraries of classical Rome, monks as far north as Ireland helped to preserve the ancient world's cultural heritage. Great works percolated back across the Continent over the centuries, traveling from scriptorium to scriptorium in Scotland, England, Northern Europe, and through the center of the classical world: Italy, Greece, France, and Spain.

Aeschylus' great tragedy about Agamemnon and Cassandra, Euripides's romantic story of Jason and Medea; Plato's "Necessity is mother of invention" and his ideas of soul and sin; the logic and scientific system of Aristotle; the penitent meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the grandiose speeches of Cicero that have inspired politicians through the ages—none of these would have survived without the monastic scriptoria. The monks even saved the erotic works of Ovid and Sappho, by reading Christian sentiments into the steamy pagan poetry.

The Monks of Jerusalem in Chicago and other orders recognize the deep historical resonances of their work with The Electronic Scriptorium, but that's not why they do it. They work because they need the money. Monasteries always have had to fend for themselves. This is because monks and nuns are by nature slightly rebellious. Rejecting the hierarchies of the Church, the world's oldest bureaucracy, monks and nuns insist on a life more closely like that of Jesus. From the beginning, this intellectual independence has also required financial independence. Saint Jerome (321 420 CE) wrote of the scriptoria as a source of revenue for the monasteries. The struggle to keep monastic communities financially afloat has continued from then to now. Monks and nuns have farmed, made cheese, beer, wine, vinegar, sandals, and, more recently, jams and fruitcakes.

"The monasteries most interested in working with us are usually new communities, those without an established source of income," says Leonard.

"The computer work is less invasive. It allowed us to set up a time frame of when we're going to work and when we're not," says Brother Thomas Baxter, who seven years ago helped found Monks of Jerusalem, The Monastery of the Holy Cross. First in Minnesota, and for the last three years in Chicago, the monks used to keep body and soul together through odd jobs. Brother Thomas took on the duties of chaplain for a long-term care facility; Brother Christian Kneblik bagged groceries in a local supermarket; Brother Edward Glanzmann taught theology at a parochial high school; and Brother Patrick Creeden worked as a chaplain in hospitals. This moneymaking patchwork had to be squeezed into a busy day: prayers at 5:30 a.m., noon, 5:30 p.m., and 9 p.m., for a total of about four hours in church; private meditation for two hours in the afternoon; one-on-one meetings for spiritual direction, business meetings, and all the usual chores of daily living—cooking, washing clothes, gardening, house maintenance. The commuting, bureaucratic hassles, and conflicts created a time crunch hardly conducive to spiritual peace.

The Electronic Scriptorium has liberated them from all that. The monks don't have to cope directly with the demands of business. They can set their schedule as they please. The work is quiet. The Monks of Jerusalem believe the arrangement so fits their needs that they invested almost all of their 1994 earnings in computer equipment, buying the best hardware they could afford: a 486 PC, three 386 workstations, a file server, and a CD-ROM server with seven drives. "They're already outdated," sighs Brother Thomas.

In a dark blue tunic and scapular that could have been lifted from the parchment of a medieval manuscript, Brother Thomas begins his four hours of data entry by settling his tall, lean frame into an ergonomically correct office chair. He picks up a 3-by-5 index card from the old high school library shelf list, glances at the title, and types a Library of Congress number into the 010 field of the program. If the book is in the Library of Congress database, the program will bring up the entire record, including author, publication date, and all other relevant information. If he doesn't get a hit, Brother Thomas types the International Standard Book Number in the 020 field, and perhaps the first few words of the title.

The program searches several databases stored on seven CDs connected to the network server. If this technique doesn't pull up the record, Brother Thomas will create a new record by copying what information there is from the card. He'll check coding and spelling, assign a barcode to the book, scan it into the catalog, and move on to the next one. Eventually, he and the other brothers will have created digital records for all the books in a library. They'll send this to Scriptorium headquarters, where it will be double-checked and delivered to the client.

The monks often correct errors in the original catalog. "I'm convinced these cards were compiled by schoolkids on detention," Brother Thomas says. In nearby carrels, other monks sift through their own drawers of cards. The work requires exacting precision. A misspelled word may render the book unfindable.

A botched code may mean the entire record must be redone. Brother Patrick maintains his sense of humor by keeping a running list of his favorite goofy titles. His favorite so far is Lewis Grizzard's Don't Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know Them Taters Got Eyes. Brother Patrick's list is reminiscent of the medieval scribe's Explicuit feliciter at the end of manuscripts—"Thank goodness it's finished."

Here business and lofty themes rest upon a foundation of thousands of humble, grinding tasks. The repetition appeals to monasteries. In their governing guidelines, or Rules of Life, all monastic orders make it clear that each monk must earn his keep by the work of his hands, as Jesus did. While it's not exactly cow-herding or ditch-digging, data entry is certainly manual work. And since pay comes by the piece—15 to 20 cents per record—Scriptorium work qualifies as the work of the Common Man. After becoming proficient with the software, a monk can earn a median wage of $12 an hour. Working only four hours a day, this works out to about $12,000 annually.

"A goal from ancient monasticism is continual prayer. The early monks desired to make the whole day a prayer," Brother Thomas explains. "That doesn't mean you're saying Hail Marys all day long—that's vocal prayer. In my mind, to be continually at prayer is to give myself over to the task completely, to honor the task, and, in this way, to honor God."

This sort of attitude makes monastics highly desirable employees. Dozens of offshore companies already specialize in what might be called human OCR: records of credit card companies, airlines, and manufacturers are regularly sent overseas for data entry. Phone books might be input in India; ticket records in the Philippines.

Companies that market human OCR advertise 99 percent accuracy, but it's often much lower. (The Scriptorium has redone jobs first input overseas.) At $12 to $14 an hour, the monks and nuns cost more, but Scriptorium clients say the quality makes it worthwhile. The company trades on the fact that some things require more understanding than mere rote: in doing a library catalog, the worker has to know that "Shakespear" isn't correct. In doing MARC records, the worker must be able to catch it when the Bibliofile program truncates the first A of a title, mistaking it for coding. When logging in a recipe from Gourmet, he or she should recognize that a recipe calling for "2 cups baking powder" would make a loaf the size of an apartment.

In Saint Joseph, a farm town in southern Minnesota, the Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict are cataloguing the photo library of The New York Daily News. They once had an extended discussion over whether the NBA's New York Knicks, shorthand for Knickerbockers, should take an apostrophe. Should it be "Knicks forward" or "Knicks' forward"? That kind of exactitude doesn't often come from an employment agency referral.

Monastics have everything needed for Scriptorium work: education, judgment, and, above all, precision and patience. It's part of their vows. Lectio divina, or "divine reading," takes up a large part of the life of any monk or nun. Like most other monastics, Brother Thomas picks a short passage from Scripture each afternoon. For an hour or two, he retreats to his cell, a small room with only a bed, a nightstand, and a table and chair. There, he focuses on this small bit, trying to plumb its depths, to look beyond the obvious meaning. He quiets his mind so that the passage can "speak to him." Used to spiritual discipline, the brothers and sisters are also willing to take time to be fussy about their Scriptorium work.

"The monks are literate. They have expertise and intellectual judgment," says Scott Brownstein, of Applied Graphics Technologies, the Rochester, New York, company that is coordinating the effort to digitize the millions of pictures in the New York Daily News library. "We just couldn't get the same quality offshore in Jamaica. With the monks, we get quite a lot for our money."

Humble work lies at the center of the monastic vocation, but their choice of lifestyle doesn't mean that they are a different strain of humanity. Many monastics devote much time to the human condition: teaching and working in hospitals and homeless shelters. But isn't the decision to withdraw from the world that lies at the center of the monastic vocation at odds with working on the Internet, with its pockets of humanity at its wildest and woolliest?

Negotiating a balance between separation and connection has always been one of the central challenges for monks and nuns. As the Rule of Life for the Monks of Jerusalem puts it, "Give up theaters and cinemas once and for all. This is part of the necessary break. But be well informed, open to others, attentive to the city's cries for help."

Separation. Connection. Separation. Connection. These men and women are happy to walk the line. Still, Scriptorium headquarters tries to shield its workforce as much as it can. (Of course, with computers, cinema and all sorts of other modern clamor can beam right into the cloister.) The Scriptorium refuses projects with tight time deadlines, so that the monasteries are sheltered from the world's insistent time pressures. They recently turned down a suggestion to digitize the archives of 8 million skin photos from a major men's magazine.

The strict, ascetic Trappists at Holy Cross Abbey near Berryville, Virginia, have learned how easy it is to stumble into sticky situations in the electronic sphere. Emboldened by the experience of automating their fruitcake business and working with The Scriptorium, the brothers decided to put up a Web page promoting their fruitcakes. Within weeks, however, they discovered that they had been prominently linked to another Web page, which put them alongside links to a Monty Python page with audio clips from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

"I told the other brothers that our page had been lumped in the same category as Monty Python. Many of them had never heard of Monty Python," explains Brother Barnabas Brownsey, who had been a sales manager before entering the cloister (he now manages the abbey's computer systems). "I downloaded a couple songs and played them. The brothers were horrified. We complained to the salesman from our Internet provider."

Others have found work with computers and The Scriptorium to be broadening without creating impossible moral dilemmas. "It's not a conflict for me," says Sister Edna Otte, who is helping to catalog the sometimes lurid newspaper pictures of mob hits and scantily clad women from The New York Daily News. "Not only is the work meaningful, it is opening up my mind. A lot of things that I heard in passing are becoming more clear as I go through these photos."

Exactly how wired each monk and nun becomes—and how interested they are in cyberspace—seems to depend on whether their focus is on service or on contemplation. The more contemplative orders—the Trappists and the Monks of Jerusalem—do not watch TV or listen to radio. In keeping with that tradition, they use the Internet sparingly, sticking to email and mailing lists.

Brother Thomas of the Monks of Jerusalem, for example, corresponds regularly with other monasteries, especially one in Paris that is the model for the Chicago community. The monks also write regularly to a priest in London. Brother Thomas used to have difficulty reaching his scattered family; he might connect with them only once a month. Now that his relatives all have America Online accounts, they correspond two or three times a week. (He and the other monks make a distinction between the phone and email. At the monastery, they follow the custom of not making or receiving phone calls during the Grand Silence between the end of Compline in the evening and Morning Prayer. However, Brother Thomas explains, it is possible to check mail and dash off a couple of notes "after hours" without disturbing the silence in the house.)

In contrast, the Sisters of St. Benedict have largely embraced the information revolution. Benedictines have a tradition of intellectualism—the sisters have long been involved with the College of St. Benedict for women—and many of the teaching sisters subscribe to mailing lists and follow current events online. They are also email pros. They've electronically publicized their publication of a new Liturgy of the Hours. Using the Internet, they're participating in Project Global 2000, an effort to get the United Nations to accept a unified statement of morality. Many sisters used their computers to follow the 1995 United Nations women's conference in Beijing; they've done the same to keep up with synods in Rome.

"We're seeing the end of the era when the book is the main basis of knowledge," says Sister Johanna Becker, an Asian art historian at the College of St. Benedict. "The whole mode of thinking will be more fluid and more chaotic, less judgmental and less analyzed according to a systematic pattern, intuitive."

Yet even the Net-savvy Sisters of St. Benedict emphasize that they limit their time on the Internet. "I do surf on the Net. It's entertainment for me," says Sister Linda Kulzer, an energetic woman with just a dusting of gray in her dark hair. "But I force myself to step back. I don't want to be eaten up by it. I want to be centered."

Faced with the chaos of the Internet, almost every monk and nun falls back on one of the central characteristics of their vocation: choice. Monks and nuns choose to give up their address books and their possessions. They choose a life of silence, celibacy, and prayer. Brother Christian Kneblik—who has the wire-rimmed glasses and good looks of a contemplative John Denver—is typical. A young monk under first vows at Chicago's Monastery of the Holy Cross, he grew up Catholic in Houston, Texas, but never really considered himself devout. He went to church but sometimes had religious doubts. When he graduated from college, he started working in real estate appraisal. A job, spending money, a car, and an apartment—this was what it was all about. "But I couldn't escape the thought, 'This is it?'" he says. "I felt lonely, oddly empty."

One night while trying to go to sleep, Brother Christian experienced an "indescribable," intense, almost physical feeling of the presence of God. It lasted about half an hour. "I didn't want to move for fear I might mess it up," he says. "From then on, I knew God was real. I went to work the next morning with a completely different attitude." He paid off what he calls his "yuppie debt," then moved to the Midwest to do youth ministry, and stumbled across the Monks of Jerusalem. "Of course, I still get lonely sometimes," he says. "Just because you enter a community like this doesn't mean you stop being human. I have a need for emotional intimacy, just as everyone does. But I pursue that intimacy in my relationships with the other monks, and with God."

Brother Christian is obviously happy with the choices he has made. From this position of voluntary limits, it's a short jump to choose to limit Internet access. To avoid, say, the alt.sex newsgroups.

"The Internet, the equipment, the technology is neutral," explains Brother Patrick Creeden, of the Monks of Jerusalem. "Part of what we're doing in using computers is to prove in some tiny way that you can use modern technology and not be dehumanized by it, not lose one's soul. The information revolution can be a humanizing force."

As a tool, monasteries and the rest of the Church have embraced the Internet unreservedly. Monks correspond cross-country on issues of theology. Nuns across the country subscribe to the SISTER-L mailing list. On AMERCATH-L, the American laity can hash out views on abortion, ordination of women, and other hot topics. Busy Catholics can now do their confession on a British website. Half a dozen monasteries involved with The Scriptorium have designed their own Web pages or are planning to do so.

When cyberspace is the topic, monks and nuns often turn the conversation to the possibilities of electronic evangelizing, of "explaining who we are," and of "the great spiritual hunger" they perceive in the world at large. In Minnesota, Sister Cecelia says, "We need to break through the misconceptions about monastic life. The electronic world is one way to do that." Within four days of putting up its website, Holy Cross Abbey in Virginia got a call from a young man who wanted to discuss vocation, or the possibility of becoming a monk at the abbey.

Even those of us who have long been more comfortable with the absence of religion than with the top-down dictates of church hierarchy can feel the pull, the need for fellowship. Isn't that the promise of the Net? Doesn't the Internet, by its nature, require the point-to-point communication essential to the spiritual?

"The electronic world parallels the reality of prayer," says Brother Benedict, the Holy Cross Abbey monk who first dreamed up the idea for The Scriptorium. On the Net, he explains, a person is at once centered in an individual computer and part of a vast network that is everywhere and yet nowhere. Thanks to The Electronic Scriptorium's MARC records, each book may one day be connected by invisible threads to the whole fabric of the society's collective membership.

Similarly, with every morning, with every Psalm, a monk connects: as an individual seeking the greater whole that is God.