Just like scribes need to craft there own pens and ink, they needed to craft their own parchment too. Parchment, or vellum, is a writing support made from the animal skins prepared in a certain manner to make it suitable to be written on. Some scholars will reserve the term vellum to indicate that a writing support is made specifically of calf skin and parchment to indicate that it is from the skin of a sheep or a goat. It is not easy to distinguishes between the two types, so generally we can refer to writing supports made from animal skin as parchment and further define it as what type if need be. “Recognizing the species from which a sheet of parchment was made is difficult because a characteristic that may at first sight appear to be an indication of the type of skin used can in fact be the result of the method of preparation” (Graham and Clemens 9).