UCLA International Institute, CA
Sept 25 2004

Discovering Primary Sources

A team of graduate students is working with the UCLA Library’s
Special Collections staff, Middle East Bibliographer and Digital
Library Coordinator to catalog the library’s extensive collections of
Arabic, Persian and Ottoman manuscripts.

Howard Batchelor

From Minasian ms 40, Nizam al-Din Nishaburi’s commentary on Ptolemy’s
Almagest

The UCLA Library’s Department of Special Collections has long been an
important destination for scholars of the post-classical Islamic
traditions of law, philosophy, science, religion and literature. The
library holds several important collections in this area, including
that of Caro Minasian, an Iranian physician who collected manuscripts
in Isfahan during the 1930s and 1940s, and who also gave the library
the Gladzor Gospels, an Armenian treasure dating from the early
fourteenth century. Minasian’s diverse collection included many
manuscripts of medical interest that are now stored in UCLA’s
Biomedical Special Collections. These have been extensively cataloged
and microfilmed, but the remainder of his collection is known only
through the brief descriptions of Muhammad Danish’pazhuh who
described UCLA’s Near East collections as part of an Iranian
scholarly project during the 1970s.

In 2000, the Library’s Middle East Bibliographer David Hirsch
proposed that access to the collections could be improved by creating
a digital version of the Danish’pazhuh catalog. The project then
became part of UCLA’s Digital Library Program, whereby graduate
students with the necessary language skills and scholarly motivation
were recruited to take on the task of examining each manuscript and
creating a record. The current team includes Ghazzal Dabiri (Persian
manuscripts), Ahmed Alwishah and Hassan Hussain (Arabic manuscripts),
and Mehmet Sureyya Er (Ottoman manuscripts), and has also benefited
from the work of Dalia Yasharpour and Lars Schumaker. The team is
working on both the Minasian Collection and Collection 896, a
repository of Ottoman Turkish poetry.

David Hirsch oversees the work of representing the names of authors
and the titles of works in romanized form and in their original
languages, while the Digital Library Program is preparing an online
catalog that will support searching and record display in Arabic,
Persian and Ottoman Turkish, using a Unicode-compliant Oracle 9-i
database and Java Enterprise2. Among the many and various challenges
posed by this project, the technical goal of creating a system that
can support the original languages stands out as a challenge for
library system architecture.

The project has very strong endorsement from UCLA’s new University
Librarian Gary Strong, who supports the goal of making resources
directly accessible in non-Western languages. The project has also
received guidance and encouragement from Professor Hossein Ziai,
Director of Iranian Studies at UCLA, noted for his contributions to
the study of Islamic philosophy, and from George Saliba, Professor of
Arabic and Islamic Science at Columbia University, who has written of
the role played by Arabic astronomers in the `Copernican Revolution.’

The goal of the project is to provide accurate manuscript description
in an online catalog that can also be used internally to capture
commentary by visiting scholars, and that can support the use of
primary sources in teaching at UCLA and other universities.
Digitization services can be provided to UCLA faculty and scholars
elsewhere who wish to investigate manuscripts more closely. Two mss
from the Minasian Collection are currently accessible to students in
Professor Michael Cooperson’s Arabic 250 course. The Digital Library
Program welcomes interest by Arabic and Persian specialists in all
disciplines.

The work is often justified by the excitement of discovery. Included
here is a page from Minasian ms 40, the autograph commentary of the
Persian astronomer Nizam al-Din Hasan Nishaburi, written in Arabic in
CE 1326, on Ptolemy’s Almagest (Sharh al-majasti). Here, as elsewhere
in the work, Nishaburi is teaching Euclidean geometry.

Howard Batchelor is UCLA Digital Library Coordinator.