Launching the Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Partnership
Posted on
The BA, the Wellcome Library and King’s College London Digital Humanities Department have recently launched the Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Partnership (WAMCP) with a fund from JISC Islamic Studies Programme and the Wellcome Trust.
Based on the Wellcome Library Arabic manuscript collection, the unique online resource includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis, lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare copies such as Averroes’ commentaries on Avicenna’s medical poetry. Using groundbreaking functionalities, WAMCP brings together rich descriptive information and exceptionally detailed images.
All the manuscripts have been photographed in their entirety, and can be viewed in details alongside the comprehensive manuscript descriptions. Sophisticated cataloguing tools were built based on definitive standards in order to achieve rich, thorough manuscripts descriptions. Users are able to link between specific descriptive fields and the related images with the possibility to compare two manuscripts side-by-side on the screen to illuminate the differences. Moreover, significant passages in the manuscripts, such as the incipits, basmala, explicits and section headings, are fully transcribed.
This JISC-funded project has surmounted the challenges of digitizing manuscripts presenting the remarkable collections at the Wellcome Trust along with the technical and academic expertise of the BA, and creating a resource that opens up new avenues in Islamic Studies.