About the Project
The University of Michigan Library has been awarded a CLIR-sponsored, Mellon-funded “Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives” grant to support our "Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan" project.
One of only 13 selected from a total of 118 applications, the 3-year project involves the creation and exposure of digital surrogates and catalog records for roughly 1,250 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish dating from the 8th to the 20th century AD.
This website is at the center of an approach that will provide unified access to bibliographic records and digital surrogates for the Islamic manuscripts; facilitate the gathering of informative and insightful commentary from scholars on campus, across the country, and around the world; and expose in real time the dynamic enrichment of bibliographic information as project staff and scholars interact with the system.
By making digital surrogates and preliminary metadata for our collection of Islamic manuscripts available to the widest possible community, inviting scholarly commentary in the form of amplification, clarification, and correction, and incorporating those contributions into the cataloguing process, we are creating and making the best possible use of an aggregate of expertise that is uniquely positioned to help us overcome the challenges inherent in traditional manuscript cataloguing.
Site content is managed by the project cataloguer, who oversees the posting of existing descriptive information as well as the incorporation of submitted commentary into the cataloguing process. Please contact her islamic.manuscripts@umich.edu with any recommendations or concerns.
Further detail on the project can be found here.