UCLA Library Blogs

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded the Library a grant for a project to catalog, digitize, and provide online access to the Caro Minasian Collection of Near Eastern manuscripts. The collection forms a rich repository of Islamic learning and contains more than 1,500 manuscripts in Arabic and Persian dating from the 14th to the 19th centuries on astronomy, government, history, language and grammar, law, literature, philosophy, religious practice, and science.

The grant, in the amount of $346,117, was awarded as part of the NEH Preservation and Access program, which supports efforts to preserve and provide intellectual access to humanities collections. These collections may include books, journals, newspapers, manuscript and archival materials, maps, still and moving images, sound recordings, and objects of art and material culture.

The project has four components, the first of which will involve creating metadata records for all works in the collection. These records will form the basis for traditional catalog records, will facilitate sharing data and image files, and will allow for annotation, transcription, and other scholarly activities.

The second component will entail digitizing more than three hundred of the most significant manuscripts in the collection, which, together with those digitized previously, will create a collection of 470 digitized manuscripts, totaling approximately 92,000 pages.

The third component will be to create a search-and-retrieval system that supports discovery, display, and navigation by users in English, as well as Arabic and Persian, the principal vernacular languages represented in the collection. Future plans include development of a virtual research environment in which scholars can manipulate, annotate, transcribe, and share manuscripts and information about the manuscripts in non-Roman scripts and which also would allow these scholarly activities to be captured, preserved, and made available for ongoing exchange.

For the final component, project managers will meet with scholars, archivists, and librarians from other institutions with major Near Eastern manuscript collections to plan a service to provide access to Near Eastern manuscript collections worldwide.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 10:03 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.