Dr Walid Ghali preparing a manuscript for digitisation (Photo Credit: Nourmamadcho Nourmamadchoev)
In a time when online learning has become a critical necessity, a select few institutions have proven to be a step ahead. The Aga Khan Library in London is one such institution that began digitizing its collections a few years ago with the goal of facilitating research all over the globe on Islam. Their head librarian Dr. Walid Ghali has played an indispensable role in this multifaceted process, and we have had the good fortune to discuss with him his experiences both in the position as well as those leading up to it.Continue reading “Walid Ghali, Aga Khan Library”
TYPE Lab (Credit to Sarah Shebl and the TYPE Lab design team).
While historians have made efforts to document the Arabic script from both historical and visual perspectives, few have made the information and resources on the Arabic script accessible to the general public. Bahia Shehab is an artist, activist and academic who has recently founded TYPE Lab at the American University in Cairo (AUC). TYPE Lab is dedicated to promoting the documentation and development of the Arabic script in both Arabic and English, as well as to encouraging conversation around its history and development. Here, she describes her team’s efforts to create a project that reproduces and documents over 70,000 historical and contemporary Arabic letters in the Visual Encyclopedia of Arabic Letters, a TYPE Lab project, and make them open access so that artists, designers, historians and academics can learn more about the letters’ aesthetic features as well as their chronological information. While the TYPE Lab website is underway, the Facebook and Instagram pages are regularly used to share Arabic letters as well as events that host various designers, historians, publishers, academics and other speakers who have experience with the Arabic script. As this project unfolds over the coming years, we look forward to how Shehab and her team will have developed this project and taken it further.
(Questions by Marwa Gadallah, with contributions by N.A. Mansour)
Manuscript digitization projects are increasing accessibility to researchers who, for a variety of reasons, cannot access collections in person. The Manuscripts of the Muslim World project is one such exciting project to hit the scene, not least because they actively share recently digitized manuscripts on their active Twitter account. We talked to Project Cataloger Dr Kelly Tuttle about its place in the digital humanities landscape and how to use this exciting new tool.
Describe your academic background and involvement with the MMW project?
I have a PhD in Arabic from the University of Pennsylvania and use manuscripts frequently in my own research. Right after I completed the degree, I worked in a library for a year while I looked for a traditional academic job. Once I found one, I discovered that was not really what I wanted to be doing, so when this position was posted, I jumped on it. It has been great to return to library work and to see this variety of manuscripts. Every day is different and I’m learning so much. As far as what I do for the project itself, I’m the cataloguer, which means that I try to identify and describe each manuscript that is part of the project. I’m sure I make mistakes, but fortunately, there is a growing team of volunteers who are willing to contribute their advice to the project, when asked. I also produce the metadata for the digital images that appear on OPenn, an open access repository for primary source materials.What is MMW, and what is its current status
MMW stands for Manuscripts of the Muslim World (also called Muslim World Manuscripts by one of the participating repositories). It is a project supported by a 3-year Digitizing Hidden Collections grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and is currently in the beginning of its second year. As the grant name suggests, it is a cooperative effort to digitize and catalog the ‘hidden’ Islamicate manuscripts held in three repositories: Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the University of Pennsylvania. Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College are also contributing holdings to the project. The collections were considered ‘hidden’ because many of the Islamicate manuscripts have been lingering uncatalogued in these repositories and therefore have remained largely unseen and unresearched. We hope that this grant will help make researchers, students, and other interested parties more aware of the holdings at each of these repositories and encourage their use. Since the manuscripts will also all be digitized in high quality file formats, anyone will be able to make use of these resources even if they are not able to come to the area in person. Since this is a cooperative project, there are many different players involved. Each institution has a project lead, Mitch Fraas at Penn, Caitlin Goodman at Free Library, and Kate Harcourt at Columbia along with many other support personnel who help keep everything running smoothly. Deserving of special mention here are the staff at the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI) at Penn and the Digital Imaging Lab at Columbia, who photograph everything, as well as the Digital Content team at Penn, who make everything available on OPenn, and at Columbia who add the holdings to the Internet Archive.
Andrea-Nunez: She is the photographer for this project at Penn. Here, she is photographing a Shāhnāmah from Free Library.
Do you have any advice for researchers who plan to use these collections?
Many of these manuscripts have been languishing unattended for a good, long while. Therefore, the time is right to poke around, find fun things to study, and bring the knowledge to the public. Browse the collections! I’m sure you’ll find something that interests you. So far, things that have stuck in my head while cataloging are that Columbia holds quite a number of teaching texts, and math and science works, in addition to some rather rare items, like a commentary in Aljamiado (Ms. Or. 515) and a forgery (Ms. Or. 388) produced in Palermo in the late 18th century. A blog post from the Columbia library gives some details about the collectors who provided most of the collection and some of what you will find in it. The Free Library has an excellent collection of illustrated manuscripts, including one illustrated version of part of the life of Emperor Akbar which is quite different from anything I’ve seen before (Lewis O 45). Penn and Bryn Mawr each have rather eclectic collections with some unique items. What immediately comes to mind from Penn is a Qur’ān that was copied in Malta (Ms. Codex 1904) and a divination book that has some fun illustrations (Ms. Codex 1898) and from Bryn Mawr a Shāhnāmah that is in an excellent state of semi-finishedness (BMC 65) with illustrations in all stages of development. Haverford has a good collection of Syriac manuscripts along with some Arabic and Persian, one of which a former owner has decorated with a number of rather awesome marginal doodles (Haverford College, Quaker & Special Collections mss. RH 66). The project is only half done, though, so more interesting things will surely be turning up!
Columbia_MsOr515: Folio 4v, Risālah, late 16th century. Text in Aljamiado, Spanish in Arabic letters.
For those of you browsing the digital collections, OPenn is a great repository, but it can look a little bare bones if you are used to the page-turning type of digital repository. With that in mind, if you go to the OPenn site you can read the introduction to find out how to use the repository and cite the works . You can then browse by repository , or, for this collection you can go to ‘Curated Collections’ and then to ‘Manuscripts of the Muslim World’ . Once you are there, you can search by Shelfmark, or browse through the holdings. The images, records, and metadata are all there for the taking. Please do help yourselves; it is all open access.
What are some challenges you’ve encountered in cataloging these manuscripts?
No one can be expert in all aspects of Islamicate manuscripts, and for a collection like this one, which is eclectic, spans 10 centuries, and covers areas from West Africa to India, I frequently run into things I’ve not seen before and for which I have very little reference. Thankfully, there is a growing set of resources for Islamicate manuscripts. There are still large areas, however, that are yet to be studied more fully. Perso-Indian manuscripts are one obvious example. I am not familiar with the tradition from my own training or research, but they exist in these particular collections in fairly significant numbers, and I am undoubtedly missing nuances of the copies and history as I catalog. Illustrated manuscripts present another type of challenge since I have had only minimal art historical training. I ask for outside help about the manuscripts with which I have difficulties, but sometimes answers are slow to come. I hope that having all the manuscripts available publicly will encourage people to get in touch with suggested revisions and improvements to the records, especially with regard to the structural metadata for illustrations. Another challenge has been with languages that I cannot read, but which form part of the collection; fortunately, volunteers have come to my rescue in cases like that. The project has been lucky, and I am extremely grateful, that so many people have been willing to donate their time and expertise when we need it. I hope the volunteers will continue to contribute their input.
What is your favorite manuscript you’ve worked on so far?
I don’t have a favorite, because there are cool things about each of the manuscripts I’ve worked on so far. I like anything that is a bit of a challenge, for which I need to do some digging. I also like anything that teaches me something new (so that is basically every manuscript out there). I also like finding connections between these manuscripts and manuscripts in other repositories, for example shared owner’s notes or stamps, or a scribe who copied one of these manuscripts and who I can actually then find listed elsewhere. The collections in the project were not built very systematically and so these connections do not often appear, so when they do, it is particularly nice. I also quite like it when the manuscripts seem like they’ve had a long, interesting life—when they have lots of marginalia, for example, or numerous owner’s notes, or tipped in notes and explanations. All of that is fun.
Could you tell us a bit about the advantages and disadvantages of working with digital images of manuscripts?
Since the project is based at Penn, I don’t actually see the Columbia manuscripts in person, for the most part. I therefore catalog their holdings from digital images and preliminary records that graduate students at Columbia have been learning to create. This has the advantage of letting me work remotely, but the disadvantage of obscuring some elements that would be noticeable in person. Knowledge of the paper is the most obvious drawback to digital images. You cannot look through a digital image as you would a piece of paper to see watermarks and laid and chain lines, for example. It is also more difficult to tell anything about the weight or texture of paper. Sometimes, it is hard to tell whether it has been blind-ruled or not. So, that’s a drawback. Another drawback is size distortion that comes about via digital images. A side effect of having all the images show up the same size on the monitor is that I sometimes lose track of whether I’m looking at a pocket-sized or a monumentally-sized Qurʾān, for example. That isn’t the fault of the digitizers or anything, and the measurements are of course provided along with the images, but it is easy to forget and think of all the books as the same size when they aren’t in front of you in person. A benefit of digital images, though, is the manipulability of them, which is to say they can be enlarged, cropped, rotated, and flicked through quickly without doing damage to the item. That aspect of digital images has been supremely useful in this project for reading small text, scribbly notes, for magnifying portions of the page for detail.
Is it possible for people to contribute to MMW?
In the sense that people can contribute their observations about the manuscripts, yes! Contribution is welcome and encouraged. Please do look at the digital images and decipher things that still need deciphering. Owner’s notes for example, stamps, other notes that were illegible to me, but might be legible to you, identifying what’s going on in an illustration so that I can update the structural metadata. In that sense, yes, we welcome contributions. In fact, if you have observations about provenance agents (owners, scribes, buyers, sellers, borrowers, lenders, readers, brokers, waqf donors/recipients, etc.) that you can identify in any of these manuscripts and you want to enter that information, along with the transcribed note, into the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, that would be a significant help.
Penn_LJS405: Folio 1v, copy of Tasʹhīl al-naẓar wa-taʻjīl al-ẓafar, 14th century? This is an example of a leaf covered in owner’s notes. Help transcribing this type of thing is welcome and can be added to the Schoenberg Database by you, yourself! Please contribute.
Dr Kelly Tuttle is the project cataloger for the Manuscripts of the Muslim World grant. She is located at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts and is reachable via email at tuttlek@upenn.edu. You can also follow the project on Twitter: @MmwProject.
The last ten years alone have seen a boom in digital resources for Islamicists and historians of the Middle East. Be it bibliographical tools, like Jara’id, or online photo archives, like Akkasah, the future will only continue to see the expansion of our toolkits, inspiring new research questions in the process. One such tool is the Islamic Painted Page (IPP). In honor of the site’s relaunch this month, we have an interview with its creator, Stephen Serpell.
Our second interview for Deep in the Stacks is with Mehmet Kentel, Head Librarian, and Akın Özarslantürk, Branch Librarian at the AnadoluMedeniyetleri Araştırma Merkezi (ANAMED), or Research Center for Anatolian Civilization (RCAC).
Akın (l) and Mehmet (r)
How did you get interested in library work?
Mehmet: I think I can call myself as an ‘accidental librarian’, even though my primary identification would still be related to my ongoing work as a historian-to-be. I was a fellow at the Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) during 2014-15 academic year. Towards the end of it, and inspired by the work being done at the center, I started thinking seriously on a professional/administrative position within the larger domain of academia, that is not necessarily entailed teaching. Jobs like curating exhibitions, working at research centers, libraries, etc. started to be increasingly relevant and exciting. Akın’s example as a librarian, who is not only extremely helpful, but also engaged with every step of a researcher’s work, was also inspiring. And at this very time, by total coincidence, Özge Ertem, the then-Head Librarian of the ANAMED Library, resigned from her post to continue her postdoctoral studies at Harvard University. Özge is also a historian of the Ottoman Empire, and I saw in her persona that these two professional identities may actually get along quite nicely. So I applied for the position, and I am lucky that they thought I would make a good match.
Akın: Similarly, I never planned to be a librarian even while I was studying librarianship. After I graduated I couldn’t find a better option so I decided to be a librarian.
Tell us a bit about the patrons that your library serves, how would you describe the community?
Mehmet: We have several groups of patrons, with varying needs and degrees of attachment to the institution. Of course, the Library is first and foremost the library of the ANAMED and its fellows. ANAMED hosts around 30-35 fellows for an academic year, some staying for full 9 months, some for shorter periods. These fellows come from various parts of the world and have a wide range of academic interests (from Neolithic archaeology to contemporary heritage issues) as well as standings (from PhD candidates to emeritus professors). Our main mission is to support and facilitate the research of these fellows. But ANAMED Library is also a branch of the Koç University Suna Kıraç Library, and hence we also serve Koç University professors and students. ANAMED has especially close ties with the Art History and Archaeology Department and the History Department. Their students and professors are among our most constant patrons. Lastly, we also serve a large community of researchers based in Istanbul, even though they are not affiliated with ANAMED or Koç University. We have a special membership program that admits researchers (scholars and graduate students) in relevant fields as members, for free. This last group do not have borrowing rights. And of course, we try to pitch in for the research conducted by the ANAMED staff, for exhibitions or for other projects.
Akın: ANAMED Library’s user community, which consists of graduate students and faculty, has experience of using the library resources, much different than undergraduates. They usually ask for help about accessing specific resources that is important for their thesis or research and how to use the library equipment.
What do you think is unique to the collection or resources at your library?
Mehmet: We have a relatively small collection, around 22000 print materials. But this collection is composed of very important contributions coming from seminal names in their fields. Our special collections include the collections of the eminent Byzantinists Steven Runciman, Eunice Dauterman-Henry Maguire and Jacques Lefort; of the famous Islamic Art Historian Esin Atıl; of the renowned Hititologist Hatice Gonnet-Bağana and Muhibbe Darga; of the important numismatist Ömer Diler; and of the iconic photographer and ethnographer Josephine Powell. Overall, I can say that our strength in print materials is the most evident in the works related to Byzantine history. But what makes ANAMED Library unique among other research centers located in Istanbul is its access to a great array of electronic resources. Since we are a branch of Koç University Library, we provide access to all electronic journals, books and databases that are available at the main library.
Have you identified any areas of the collection that you hope to digitize? Which ones?
Mehmet: Two of our collections are already and partially digitized. One of them is Josephine Powell’s slide collection, comprised of the pictures Powell took during her travels in Turkey, especially relevant to the researchers of rural and nomadic life in Anatolia. Hatice Gonnet-Bağana’s excavation notes and pictures are also digitized and accessible to researchers. I believe it will be an indispensable source for the researchers interested in Hittites and the history of Hittitology. All of these are accessible via Koç University Library Digital Collections. Koç University Suna Kıraç Library also digitizes its rare manuscripts collection, and any rare item we have in our collection are sent there to be digitized. In the future, we aim to attract collections with large numbers of primary materials, which would necessarily be digitized.
Akın: We must also state that the library collection is too young. I think the digitization should be the next step after deepening the specific areas of the print collection.
Collection management is often a creative act. How you see yourself shaping the collection?
Mehmet: The most attractive responsibility of the position as I was applying was collection development, and into my seventh month as the Head Librarian of the ANAMED, I still find it as my most exciting and fulfilling duty. It is indeed creative, in the most literal sense of the word, as it involves bringing together various works that do not necessarily belong to the same field, period, methodology, etc; but you try to relate them to each other, creating a dialogue. It is of course a very contingent act, too, as our choices to add to the collection is dependent on the preferences of the fellows, budgetary decisions of the library management, the new scholarly trajectories ANAMED decides to pursue, and even the currency exchange rates we have to consider.
Akın: The head librarian is in charge of the collection management. I, as a branch librarian, used to follow the publishers and book reviews and make an effort to determine deficient resources in the collection.
Mehmet: Actually following book reviews is probably the best part of the job. It allows me to follow trends in fields very different than my own, and to appreciate different disciplines and their methodologies, giving a much more holistic perspective to the past.
RCAC library and books
What are you priorities and dreams for the collection? Are there digital resources that you are excited about collecting?
Mehmet: I myself am an Ottomanist, and my natural inclination is to enrich our collections on the Ottoman history. This fits in nicely with the shared evaluation of the ANAMED Library by Koç University Library and ANAMED managements, as all of us acknowledge that the weakest part of our collection is Ottoman history, especially compared to the large ratio of Ottomanists among our most regular patrons. But this priority should not come at the expense of other collections, especially our collection on Byzantine history, which makes us one of the leading research centers in this field. So my dream is to acquire a special collection on Ottoman history, rich with primary and secondary sources, which would fill an important gap within our collection without sacrificing other fields. And in the meantime, we continue to expand our resources with the most recent publications in all of the relevant fields, thanks to the suggestions by ANAMED fellows and staff, Koç faculty, and library members.
One of ANAMED’s scholarly directions under its new Director, Chris Roosevelt, is digital humanities. The center aims to become a focal point for digital research in Turkey, not only supporting scholars working on digital projects but also conducting its own projects, including digital mapping and digital archive initiatives. The ANAMED Library should necessarily follow suit, increasing our digital resources, as well as reference resources on digital humanities, to reach higher levels of competency in digital resource technologies.
And in terms of more ‘conventional’ digital resources, I aim to provide access to a rich historical newspapers collection, and a fuller access to Hathi.
Akın: I agree, especially regarding the special collections. I think the ANAMED Library should have more special collections, because these will draw researchers looking for unique materials.
Librarians working on the Middle East often find themselves addressing questions over cultural heritage. What do you see as some of the most pressing cultural heritage concerns in Turkey?
Mehmet: I think one does not have to be a librarian to find issues of cultural heritage very close to home. As a researcher who works on Ottoman archives, the wellbeing of the centuries-old documents, as historical sources but also as artifacts of cultural heritage, has already been very pertinent to me. The lack of transparency and accountability worries me and many Ottomanists like me concerning the future of our field and the past of our geography. As an urban historian, issues of urban renewal, debates around transformation of historic districts as well as ‘rebuilding’ of long-gone historic sites, are of course very relevant. Issues of transparency and accountability are lacking in this aspect of cultural heritage, too, this time accompanied by huge material interests. And of course, in Turkey and in our wider geography, violence against people usually come with violence against their ecology and their built environment, which puts cultural heritage at a huge risk.
ANAMED supports research in cultural heritage, and we at the library try to raise awareness on these issues by expanding our collection to this end.
What do you think are some challenges in librarianship that are unique to Turkey? Alternatively what are its advantages?
Akın: Libraries don’t receive the value as much as they deserve in Turkey. This situation sometimes forces the librarians to be innovative with funding and providing services . The advantage of this challenge is that the librarians have an extra mission and motivation on telling people how the libraries are important and valuable
Mehmet: While I am sure librarians who work at the public libraries would have a very different take on this, as a librarian of a research library, I think the biggest challenge is the overwhelming gap between research conducted in Turkish and in foreign languages. These two fields speak to each other in a very minimum level and in very scattered forms. This makes the job of the librarian quite difficult in evaluating the quality and accessibility of scholarly output. The barrier created by the Ottoman Turkish (or the language reform) also influences the quality of research. Intellectual production in the Ottoman Empire until 1920’s is still largely inaccessible to researchers who cannot read Ottoman Turkish. It is alright if one is a historian of the Ottoman Empire. But what if a Byzantinist wants to look for Ottoman Turkish production in the nineteenth century, on, say, Byzantine Istanbul? Shall I add such rare materials to the collection, or wait for transcriptions? I of course do not go into the details of difficulties that affect the entire country and all professions, such as constantly increasing prices and fluctuating currency rates.
How do you see your institution as benefiting from international collaboration? Could it potentially address any of the challenges you mentioned previously?
Mehmet: As the ANAMED Library, we benefit from the international connections and channels of collaboration both of ANAMED and Koç University Library. We have exchange agreements with various international institutions. Such collaboration helps us in reaching to the best quality work produced in other countries, especially in languages other than Turkish and English.
We currently have a very important project of collaboration that is local in its scope but international in its nature: Supported by the Istanbul Development Agency, we are creating a union catalogue called BiblioPera, a joint website and a platform, for the libraries and research centers of ANAMED, SALT Research, French Institute of Anatolian Studies (IFEA), Istanbul Research Institute (IAE), Orient Institute Istanbul, German Archaeological Institute (DAI), and the Netherlands Institute in Turkey. While all of these institutions are located in Beyoğlu, many of them are tied to foreign governments or foundations, which gives the collaboration an international aspect. By August 2016, researchers will be able to access the catalogues of all of these institutions with one click. We want this infrastructure as a basis for further collaboration, not only among these institutions, but also other research libraries located in Istanbul.
What do you think are some of the most exciting developments in libraries and librarianship right now, in Turkey or elsewhere?
Mehmet: Certainly digitization and advancement of digital technologies in humanities, not only for its own stake, but also for allowing further collaboration among librarians and researchers in an unprecedented scope. My novice observation is that these tools force researchers and librarians to work more closely, and turn libraries into scholarly environments where knowledge is not only consumed, but also actively produced.
Akın: This is especially true for the rising generation of Turkish librarians, who are very curious and talented in terms of IT services. As a consequence, many quality works showed up on the digitization and open access scene. The works on these two areas in Turkey recently are especially very exciting
Do you want to mention or talk about anything else that we have not mentioned?
Mehmet: My partner in the ANAMED Library, and in this interview, Akın Özarslantürk, has recently resigned from his position to move to Istanbul Technical University Library. Akın has been working at the Koc University Library for four and a half years, and at the ANAMED Library since 2012, and has been a crucial factor in turning the Library into one of the most popular destinations for the scholarly community residing and researching in Istanbul. He has been the solid rock of the Library as head librarians and support staff have come and gone. His incredible skills in communication and library services made him one of the most popular librarians in Istanbul. I am sure there are readers of the Hazine blog who benefited largely from Akın’s skills. In their presence, I would like to thank him and wish him the best once again.
I also would like to thanks Hazine editors, especially you, Heather, for giving us the opportunity to talk about the ANAMED Library, and also for being so patient with us.
Finally, what is the best reference question you have received?
“Deep in the Stacks” is a new feature of HAZINE that highlights the work of librarians in shaping the research collections and agenda of the field of Islamic studies as a whole.
Our first interview is with Guy Burak, Middle East Librarian at the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at New York University, guides.nyu.edu/mideast.
How did you get interested in library work?
I got interested in library work as a user in graduate school. At NYU, I worked quite closely with Peter Magierski (currently the Middle East librarian at Columbia). Then my dissertation research took me to other libraries in the Middle East, Europe and the US. Academically, I’m very interested in the circulation of texts, manuscripts and knowledge throughout the Islamic world, so in many ways I had been thinking about collecting and collections long before I became a librarian.
Tell us a bit about the patrons that your library serves, how would you describe the community?
Like most major research libraries, NYU’s Bobst Library serves the University globally (as NYU has portal campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai and numerous study abroad sites), the broader academic community and, even more generally, the public. Although the physical access to most of our collection is restricted to scholars and students affiliated with NYU, we share our resources through interlibrary loan services and other consortia NYU is part of. Our special collections are open to the public. We are also in the process of digitizing much of our Arabic collection as part of the Arabic Collections Online (ACO).
Chez Guy
What do you think is unique to the collection or resources at your library?
In comparison to other research libraries, NYU’s collection is fairly young. That said, over the years NYU has built strong Arabic, Persian and Turkish/Ottoman collections. In addition, NYU has some interesting special collections, such as the largest collection in country of cookbooks (including cookbooks from the Middle East), a large collection of Afghan materials (now digitized as part of the Afghanistan Digital Library), a sizeable collection of Persian lithographs and an interesting collection of Ottoman books from the Hamidian period.
Collection management is often a creative act. How you see yourself shaping the collection?
One of the most exciting things about being a librarian or a curator is trying to imagine the potential use of materials – be they books, artifacts, or video and sound recordings – beyond the current state of the academic field. I sometime try to imagine a future reader and guess what she would like to know about the Middle East and the Islamic world. This exercise often guides my cataloging and curatorial decisions.
At the same time, I’m trying to bring materials to the attention of potential users, mostly graduate students who are looking for research topics for their seminar papers or dissertations.
What are you priorities and dreams for the collection? Are there digital resources that you are excited about collecting?
My main priority is serving the Library’s users. In the near future, I intend to build on the strengths of NYU’s collections and keep expanding our Arabic, Persian, and Turkish collections. I hope to devote more time to enhancing existing special collections and building new ones. As I said, I am also thinking about digitizing (selectively) the collection of Hamidian books. In the more distant future, I hope NYU will be able to embark on the second phase of the Afghanistan Digital Library, covering Afghan materials from later decades.
Have you identified any areas of the collection that you hope to digitize? Which ones?
NYU is already in the process of digitizing significant parts of its collections as part of the Arabic Collections Online and the Afghanistan Digital Libraries. Once we finish cataloging the Hamidian books, we hope to digitize them as well, as they are very brittle.
Librarians working on the Middle East often find themselves addressing questions over cultural heritage. What do you see as some of the most pressing cultural heritage concerns in the Middle East?
Quite evidently the most pressing concern is the destruction of cultural heritage sites, such as museums and libraries, in warzones throughout the Middle East. A related concern is the appearance of looted manuscripts – some could be “blood manuscripts” – and artifacts on the markets.
What do you think are some challenges in librarianship that are unique to the Middle East? Alternatively what are its advantages?
All I can say about Turkish libraries is based on my work there as a researcher. The obvious advantages of Turkey are the size and quality of its manuscript collections and archives. To me, the most urgent challenge is making those unique materials discoverable (if not available) to different audiences – both academic and non-academic. An interesting challenge is how to standardize the transliteration of titles in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman in Turkish catalogs. The other major challenge is that many resources and manuscripts are not adequately described.
That said, I can say that things have improved dramatically since I started working in Turkey more than a decade ago. Also – a young generation of librarians is doing very important work in enhancing metadata and digitization.
How do you see your institution as benefiting from international collaboration? Could it potentially address any of the challenges you mentioned previously?
NYU has been and still is involved in several international collaborative projects, such as the Afghanistan Digital Library and ACO (AUB is one of the contributors to the project). That said, the collaboration with libraries in the Middle East and North Africa is still fairly limited. There are several reasons for this situation, the most significant of which are different practices and workflows (such as different cataloging conventions) and legal issues.
What do you think are some of the most exciting developments in libraries and librarianship right now, here or elsewhere?
To my mind, the most exciting development is the growing integration on different levels of the library and the cultural heritage worlds (in projects such as Europeana and Digital Public Library of America). The other exciting and challenging development is the collection and archivization of new contents, formats, and media.
Finally, what is the best reference question you have received?
It really depends on how you define what a “good” question is. I enjoy challenging queries that involve getting materials from obscure collections and small vendors. One of our users was interested in pamphlets published in late Ottoman Syria. It took me a few days to find them. In other instances, a “good” question is good because I’m interested in those questions. One of our graduate students, for example, wrote a very interesting thesis on the history of Middle Eastern studies collections during the Cold War and discussing the project with him was real fun.
“Deep in the Stacks” is a new feature of HAZINE that highlights the work of librarians in shaping the research collections and agenda of the field of Islamic studies as a whole. 