University of Michigan Library Completes Eight-Year Islamic Manuscripts Digitization Project

From the U-M Special Collections Library’s “Beyond the Reading Room” Blog by Evyn Kropf

The project began in December 2008, when our Library received a CLIR “Cataloging Hidden Collections and Archives” grant to complete the cataloging of our Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

Our cataloging project attempted a novel crowdsourcing approach to compiling the descriptions, and thus provided us with the opportunity to digitize the collection and make it even more accessible to researchers around the world.

Manuscripts were added to the HathiTrust Digital Library as they were digitized and then posted to a project blog site for commentary. As project cataloger, I reveiewed contributions received and incorporated them into the online catalog records.

Thanks to the efforts of this cataloging project (concluded successfully in 2013), the entire collection is now fully cataloged with detailed, searchable descriptions for each manuscript appearing in our online catalog Mirlyn.

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A list of the digitized manuscripts can also be browsed in the HathiTrust Digital Library.
The high-resolution digital images may be downloaded one by one or collectively in JPG or PDF.

Learn More About the Project, View Images

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