Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan

The Library has been awarded a CLIR-sponsored, Mellon-funded “Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives” grant in the amount of $225,931 to support our "Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan" project. Our project is fully funded in the amount requested and is 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 1,250 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish dating from the 8th century AD to the 20th. With over half of the contents dating from before 1800, the collection contains historical manuscripts of rich textual significance, many of which are also very beautiful in their decoration and bindings, and ranks among the largest and most important such collections in North America. The first group of these manuscripts was acquired in 1924 from the personal library of Sultan Abdülhamid II, the 34th sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The subjects covered by these manuscripts include the Qur’an (texts and commentaries); commentaries and other works of criticism; Islamic traditions, theology, and jurisprudence; and philology, philosophy, geography, history, mathematics, astronomy, and astrology. The collection also includes biography, poetry, and belles-lettres. There are many beautifully illuminated manuscripts, exceptional examples of Arabic calligraphy, and works by a number of notable authors. Click here for more information about the Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

The technical approach underlying our project is centered on the creation and deployment of a complex, database-driven website that will provide unified access to bibliographic records and digital surrogates for 1,250 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.

The project website, built on an open source platform, will be fully integrated with the Library’s central bibliographic information system (Mirlyn) and with HathiTrust, a shared digital repository that provides persistent, high-availability storage for digitized book and journal content from the collections of the University of Michigan, other Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) member institutions, and future partners. This interoperability will facilitate the automated, real-time transfer of bibliographic information and page images to the website and make possible the most innovative aspects of our project, including the iterative enrichment of catalog records as project staff on campus and scholar experts from around the world work together in a distributed, real-time environment. 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 cataloging 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 cataloging.

Project staff include Jonathan Rodgers (Principal Investigator), Martha O'Hara Conway (Project Manager), and Peggy Daub, Evyn Kropf, Nancy Moussa, Jon Rothman, and Ken Varnum. The grant funds will be used to support the website development work and a project cataloger and graduate students for the duration of the project.