JISC

While UK universities are rich in Middle Eastern manuscript collections and there is a great and increasing demand to access them, Islamic manuscript culture has received much less attention than equivalent European manuscript traditions. Fihrist: The Gateway to Manuscripts in Arabic Scripts seeks to build on the significant work already funded by JISC that has facilitated online exposure of major ‘hidden’ Islamic manuscript collections held at Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham and Yale university libraries, the School of Oriental and African Studies and the Wellcome Library.

This project aims to not only provide cross searching of existing online manuscript resources created with JISC funding but also by broadening the stakeholder base to include libraries with Islamic manuscript collections that at present do not have a significant internet presence, such as the John Rylands University Library. In addition to creating the gateway itself, the aim of the Fihrist is to create a sustainable user community of Islamic manuscript metadata standards and cataloguing tools to ensure a long term commitment by stakeholders to supporting and developing the Fihrist beyond the lifetime of the project.

The Fihrist would be the first step toward the creation of a union catalogue. This catalogue will aggregate descriptions of manuscripts from across as many UK institutions as is feasible in the project time frame and will provide the basis for further work in this area. The emphasis will be on providing access to manuscripts, but printed materials may be included as decided by the contributing institutions. Whenever possible, links to digitized materials will also be included and an option provided on the interface for those interested in only searching digitized collections.

In addition to providing unified access to collections in Arabic scripts, a primary goal of the gateway will be to provide a scalable and sustainable model for the creation of gateways that may be both built upon within Islamic studies and emulated by other fields and disciplines. To this end, scalable and replicable technologies will be used in the creation of the Fihrist. The data will be collected from contributing institutions and stored and hosted within the Bodleian Libraries’ Digital Asset Management System (DAMS).