The Academy’s Manuscripts: Preservation and Digitisation
The Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation (TIF), through its Qirab project, had begun a collaboration with the Academy of Arabic Language (AoAL) to assist with the storage, care, and digital access for the manuscripts held in the Academy’s library.
About the Academy of Arabic Language
The Academy of the Arabic Language (AoAL) is a language institution founded by a Royal Decree by Royal Decree in Cairo, Egypt in 1932. The Academy works to preserve the Arabic language and ensure its parallel development with global arts and sciences as they progress. To actualise these goals, the academy publishes standard-setting linguistic dictionaries, including Al-Mu’jam al-Kabir (The Great Dictionary) and Al-Mu’jam al-Wasīt (The Intermediary Dictionary), two of the most important contemporary dictionaries of the Arabic language, relied upon by most scholars of the Arab-Islamic world. In a similar vein, the Academy has published a series of specialised dictionaries that focus on Arabizing terminology from the arts and sciences, including that on medicine, pharmacology, chemistry, physics, geology, geography, mathematics, computing, literature, philosophy, music, and more.
The AoAL’s library has an expansive collection of over 56,000 volumes across topics within the arts and sciences. Of these, sixty-four are manuscript titles from Arab history on language, literature, exegesis, Hadith and jurisprudence.
Manuscript Assessment Tool
About the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation and the Qirab Project
The Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation is a non-profit academic organisation founded to support and advance the protection, preservation and study of the Islamic intellectual and artistic heritage. It publishes scholarly work on Islamic heritage, works to revive Islamic art practices -with a particular focus on book art, and the care and management of manuscript collections.
The Foundation’s newly launched Qirab™ project is dedicated to supporting the preservation of manuscripts within the Islamic cultural sphere. Qirab aims to provide accessible manuscript preservation, storage, handling, shelving and digitisation know-how. It also publishes Arabic translations of technical texts on the science and technology of preservation. It produces its own open-source hardware and software designs, assisting cultural institutions to develop their in-house preservation facilities at all levels of operation.
Manuscript Preservation Process
Qirab Digitisation Column (QDC100)
Collaboration between the Academy of Arabic Language and Qirab
The Academy initially identified 64 titles contained in 61 bound manuscripts within the library’s collection and catalogued them of preserving them in the best possible condition and make them accessible to the public. With this purpose in mind, mind, in 2021, the Academy invited in 2021 the Foundation to collaborate in preserving the manuscripts and producing a digital collection.
During this two-year project, Qirab has collaborated with the Academy of Arabic Language to assist with the storage, care, and digital access of the manuscripts held in the Academy library.
The Manuscripts in Archival Storage Boxes
Integrated Manuscript Management
Each manuscript’s condition was assessed and physically stabilised pre-digitisation, as part of the Integrated Manuscript Management process. Each volume was labelled with its title, shelfmark and barcode. When necessary, conservation treatments were applied to some volumes.
To ensure the preservation of the AoAL manuscripts, Qirab manufactured corrugated archival board boxes to house each volume and designed and manufactured designed and manufactured powder-coated steel bookends for safe shelving support. Temperature and relative humidity data loggers were set up in the library’s storage space to monitor the storage environment.
Qirab facilitated the conservation and safe digitisation of each of the Academy’s manuscripts, targeting a high degree of dimensional and colour accuracy, and has prepared for their upload to Archive.org with the Academy’s catalogue metadata at the following address:
https://archive.org/details/@academyofarabiclanguagecairo
The collaboration with the AoAL offered an invaluable opportunity to test Qirab’s manuscript-focused technologies including: the Qirab Conservation Cradle (QCC50), the Qirab Digitisation Column (QDC100), the Qirab Travel Digitisation Cradle (QTC50), and the Qirab Metadatatool. Qirab also used the project to refine a practical manuscript digitisation workflow based on international standards with the goal of creating a Preservation Digital Archive.
IIIF Mirador Viewer Touchscreen
In addition to creating the Archive.org online access, Qirab provided two showcases designed by Qirab to safely display library manuscript items and two touch-screen IIIF viewing stations to allow for interactive study of the manuscripts for library visitors.
To support the Academy’s dedication to the Arabic language and its history, Qirab will provide a full digitisation station for future AoAL imaging projects, and a full copy of the Preservation Digital Archive folders of all 64 manuscripts digitised thus far.
Manuscripts in Qirab Displays