One of the most interesting partnerships in the JISC Islamic Studies strand is that between the Wellcome Trust, King’s College London, and Egypt’s Biblioteca Alexandrina.
The Wellcome Trust, as part of its own digitisation programme, is digitising 500 manuscripts from its extensive collection.
King’s College London is developing a cataloguing tool which will allow for rapid description of the manuscripts according to a version of the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) prepared for Arabic documents. The tool will then be available for others to use
The Biblioteca Alexandrina will then add the catalogue / descriptions and host the manuscripts for scholarly use.
At the half way point of the project, all 75,000 manuscript images have been digitised. The software is almost complete and work is beginning on describing the 500 manuscripts. The content will be online in early 2011.
More information is available from the Wellcome Trust webpages.