JISC Digitisation Programme

The universities of Oxford and Cambridge have recently completed a project to create digital versions of the catalogue records that describe their world renowned collections of Islamic manuscripts

Available from a common search engine at http://www.fihrist.org.uk/, users can now search over detailed descriptions of over 10,000 texts.

Screenshot from 'Fihrist' - Oxford and Cambridge Islamic manuscripts catalogue

The term Fihrist comes from the book written by the 10th-century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Nadim, who wrote the Kitāb al-Fihrist, which he described as “an Index of the books of all nations, Arabs and non-Arabs alike, which are extant in the Arabic language and script, on every branch of knowledge/”

Facetted search allows for users to break down searching by author, classmark, library, date and subject heading.

This adds to completed Islamic Studies projects at the University of Birmingham, the School of African and Oriental Studies and the digitisation of Ph.D. theses, hosted by the British Library’s Ethos service

JISC is also funding the development of a gateway that will create the beginnings of a union catalogue for Islamic Studies manuscripts held in the UK. This project, including the same Oxford team, is just getting under way, and the first phase will be complete in late summer 2011.

This month sees the launch of the first phase of the Virtual Manuscript Room(VMR), as part of the Mingana Day at the University of Birmingham on 8 July.

The presentation of the collection online is a crucial part of JISC’s £1.8 million Enriching Digital Resources programme, a set of 25 projects which enhances the use of online content for teaching, learning and research

In this first launch, the VMR project making available over 10000 images from 70 Eastern manuscripts from the university’s Mingana collection, including a full set of images of one of the oldest copies of the Qur’an in existence.

A full program for the day (including lunch!) is available from the VMR launch website.  All are welcome! if you would like to come to this day, please email Frouke Schrijver at FXS821@adf.bham.ac.uk

Following the designation of Islamic Studies as a strategically important subject by the UK Government in June 2007, JISC commissioned a review of user requirements for digitised resources for researchers and teachers within higher education working in the field of Islamic Studies.

The University of Exeter carried out the study and in their final report made a range of recommendations:

• The creation of a authoritative gateway to Islamic Resources
• Develop digitised catalogues of Islamic manuscripts and related research material such as recent theses;
• The commissioning of a feasibility study into the creation of a corpus of interactive online education materials, which could also be hosted by the national gateway
• Continuation, and increase, of the subsidies for major online reference works in Islamic Studies.
• The archiving of the websites of UK Islamic organisations
• Subsidising the acquisition of an online collection of research monographs in Islamic Studies, should such a collection be developed by a commercial organisation.

Read the full report on User Requirements for Digitised Resources in Islamic Studies (Word) or (PDF).