Mouse&Manuscript was the initiative of Dorrit van Dalen, who wrote lessons 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 19, 23, 52 and edited the content for the website's 2020 launch. Peter Webb reviewed the website prior to its launch, and he is the co-content editor with Dorrit from 2021. Peter wrote lessons 2, 12, 14, 20, 21, 22, 26, 51. Dorrit and Peter co-wrote lessons 11 and 13.

The other contributors are all related through their research to Leiden University's rich collection of oriental manuscripts. They are Jelle Bruning (lessons 1, 50), Renate Dekker (4, 5), Angela Isoldi (9), Said Reza Huseini (15), Gabrielle van den Berg (18, 24, 53), Arnoud Vrolijk (25), Shahrzad Irannejad (16) and Christine Roughan (17).

The technique of the website was created in 2020 in a collaborative effort by Ben Companjen (Leiden University Libraries' Centre for Digital Scholarship), Marcel Villerius (Strategic Communication and Marketing) and Ferdinand Harmsen (ECOLe), as part of the Humanities programme ICT in het Talenonderwijs (ICT in Language Teaching) run by ECOLe.

The manuscripts presented are from the Middle Eastern Special Collections of Leiden University (except one item from the collection of the Royal Asiatic Society of Cambridge University). Their use is governed by the Terms and Conditions of the Creative Commons CC BY license. The titles of some documents in the IIIF viewer are transcribed as they are entered in WorldCat. Therefore, they do not always correspond to the style of transcription used in the lessons, which follows the Encyclopedia of Islam III.