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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-manuscript...

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&...

And all manuscripts which have been digitized are viewable here:

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=1961411403

Please forward any questions, comments, and/or suggestions to project staff at islamic.manuscripts@umich.edu. ________________________________________________________________ Evyn Kropf | Islamic Manuscripts Project Cataloguer University Library Area Programs | M117B Hatcher Library North The University of Michigan | Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1205 (734) 764-1220 | ekropf@umich.edu