Call for Participation - Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan

Call for Participation - Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic
Manuscripts at Michigan

Colleagues,

The University of Michigan Library is pleased to invite your
participation in our ongoing CLIR-funded project, "Collaboration in
Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan," by way of our newly
launched project website:

http://www.lib.umich.edu/islamic/

The project website is at the center of an approach that provides
access to bibliographic records and digital surrogates for the
Islamic manuscripts; facilitates the gathering of informative and
insightful commentary from scholars on campus, across the country,
and around the world; and exposes in real time the dynamic
enrichment of bibliographic information as project staff, scholars,
and other contributors interact with the system. By involving the
widest possible scholarly community in the iterative enrichment of
manuscript descriptions, our project makes the best possible use of
an aggregate of expertise that is uniquely positioned to help us
overcome the challenges inherent in traditional manuscript
cataloguing.

The Islamic Manuscripts Collection at the University of Michigan
contains approximately 1,100 manuscript volumes mainly in Arabic,
Persian, and Turkish and dating from roughly the 8th to the 20th
century CE. A limited amount of descriptive information for the
manuscripts has already been gathered and converted to preliminary
records in our online library catalogue. Likewise, the manuscripts
are being digitized with their digital versions appearing in the
Hathi Trust Digital Library. The existing descriptive information is
currently being enhanced as the project cataloguer and staff
examine the manuscripts (both physically and in the digital
environment) and use a research approach to assemble as rich and
analytical a description as possible for each manuscript.

We invite you to join us in the examination and description of the
manuscripts and to submit the results of your analysis as comments
via our project website. Your contributions will be reviewed by the
project cataloguer and refashioned for incorporation into the
cataloguing records for the manuscripts you examine. Additionally,
your contribution will be recognized both on the site and in the
record for the manuscript that appears in our library catalogue.

We look forward to seeing your comments posted to the project site
and thank you in advance for your valuable contribution to this
project.

Further information on the project is available here:

http://www.lib.umich.edu/special-collections-library/clir-islamic-manuscripts-project

You may browse records of all the Islamic manuscripts in our catalogue at:

http://mirlyn.lib.umich.edu/Search/Home?filter%5B%5D=location%3ASPEC%20ISLM&page=1&use_dismax=1

Please forward any questions, comments, and/or suggestions to project
staff at islamic.manuscripts@umich.edu.