UCLA Library Receives National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for
Near Eastern Manuscript Project
UC Los Angeles, CA
April 28 2007
The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded the UCLA Library
a grant for a project to catalog, digitize and provide online access
to the Caro Minasian Collection of Near Eastern manuscripts.
The collection forms a rich repository of Islamic learning and contains
more than 1,500 manuscripts in Arabic and Persian dating from the 14th
to the 19th centuries on astronomy, government, history, language and
grammar, law, literature, philosophy, religious practice, and science.
The grant, in the amount of $346,117, was awarded as part of the NEH
Preservation and Access program, which supports efforts to preserve
and provide intellectual access to humanities collections. These
collections may include books, journals, newspapers, manuscript and
archival materials, maps, still and moving images, sound recordings,
and objects of art and material culture.
"We are honored that the National Endowment for the Humanities
has chosen to fund this important project," said UCLA University
Librarian Gary E. Strong. "The materials in the Minasian Collection
are extraordinary for their intellectual content and their importance
to scholarly research, and this project also supports our efforts,
in partnership with an international group of institutions, to provide
coordinated access to Near Eastern manuscript collections worldwide."
"The Minasian Collection is one of the most important collections of
Arabic and Persian manuscripts of its kind, certainly in the U.S.,
if not internationally," said Hossein Ziai, UCLA director of Iranian
studies and professor of Iranian and Islamic studies. "Much of the
content of its manuscripts has never been systematically studied;
thus, access to such a unique collection will undoubtedly lead to
groundbreaking scholarship."
The project has four components, the first of which will involve
creating metadata records for all works in the collection. These
records will form the basis for traditional catalog records and
archival finding aids; more importantly, they will facilitate the
sharing of data and image files and will allow for annotation,
transcription and other scholarly activities.
The second component will entail digitizing more than 300 of the most
significant manuscripts in the collection. Totaling some 55,000 pages,
these digitized manuscripts, together with those in the collection
that had been digitized previously, will create a collection of 470
digitized manuscripts, totaling approximately 92,000 pages. This
digital collection will support preservation of and access to these
rare manuscripts and will also serve as a model for future digitization
projects.
The project’s third component will be to create a search-and-retrieval
system that supports discovery, display and navigation by users in
English, as well as Arabic and Persian, the principal vernacular
languages represented in the collection. Future plans include
development of a virtual research environment in which scholars can
manipulate, annotate, transcribe and share manuscripts and information
about the manuscripts in non-Roman scripts and which also would allow
these scholarly activities to be captured, preserved and made available
for ongoing exchange.
For the final component, project managers will meet with scholars,
archivists and librarians from other institutions with major Near
Eastern manuscript collections to plan a service to provide access
to Near Eastern manuscript collections worldwide.
About the UCLA Library and the Minasian Collection
Ranked among the top 10 research libraries in the U.S., the UCLA
Library system is a campuswide network of libraries serving programs
of study and research in many fields. Its collections encompass
more than eight million volumes, as well as archives, audiovisual
materials, corporate reports, government publications, microforms,
technical reports and other scholarly resources. Nearly 80,000 serial
titles are received regularly. The Library also provides access to a
growing collection of digital resources, including reference works,
electronic journals and other full-text titles and images.
The Minasian Collection is housed in the Charles E. Young Research
Library Department of Special Collections, recognized as one of the
country’s top collections of primary resources in the humanities and
social sciences. Its holdings encompass rare books and pamphlets from
the 15th through the 20th centuries; extensive manuscript holdings;
drawings, including original architectural drawings; early maps and
atlases; and photographs, prints and paintings. Collections also
contain artifacts, audiotape and videotape recordings, oral history
transcripts, phonograph records, postcards, and posters.
The Minasian Collection was created by Caro Minasian, an Armenian
physician from Isfahân, Iran, who began collecting in 1935. His
collection reflects the interests of the middle-class, educated
inhabitants of Isfahân, whose families at the time he collected these
works had preserved them as texts that represented the scholastic
milieu of the post-classical period.
Acquired by UCLA in 1968, the Minasian Collection includes manuscript
materials in Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu. The
Arabic and Persian manuscripts, which this project focuses on,
represent approximately two-thirds of the collection. A separate
project to promote access to the Turkish collection is underway,
and the Library hopes to launch similar projects focusing on the
Armenian and other materials.
About the National Endowment for the Humanities
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National
Endowment for the Humanities supports learning in history, literature,
philosophy and other areas of the humanities. NEH grants enrich
classroom learning, create and preserve knowledge, and bring ideas
to life through public television, radio, new technologies, museum
exhibitions and programs in libraries and other community places.
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