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.

-UCLA-
DS194