ACSSE, A Digital Library Infrastructure

Participants:

Coordination:

Scientific coordination:

1. Introduction

1.1. Since its foundation in 1867, the Romanian Academy Library has been collecting manuscripts in order to fulfill its role of supporting academic research. In 1880 a Manuscripts Department was established for the specialized care of this type of documents. Since than, many various manuscripts have been added to the Library's holdings, making the Department an important centre for history studies in the academic community and an important public resource.

The Library holds over 10,000 manuscript items, ranging in date and subject from theological works to modern literature: Romanian manuscripts, Slavonic, Greek, Latin, French and Oriental. The Oriental manuscripts collection is a small one - nearly 700; the subject coverage is encyclopedic, including history, biography, philosophy, theology, law and jurisprudence, language, literature, book arts and illustration, learned and popular magic, astrology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine and other aspects of the intellectual and spiritual life of the Islamic world, written in a variety of languages, including Turkish, Persian, Arabic, etc.

Manuscripts vary in date from the 16th century to the 19th century. A full record will soon be available within the manuscripts database.

1.2. The project involves the cataloguing of all manuscripts, i.e. creating an image database and bibliographic records containing basic descriptive information, helping researchers and thus opening the path to all who seek greater knowledge about the rich history and heritage of Islam, of Eastern cultures in general. This will be a contribution to the positively beneficial scholarly exchange and deep understanding between nations.

1.3. The primary aim of this project is to offer free access to online, searchable copies of previously unpublished Oriental Manuscripts Collections (hereafter 'OMC'), to develop and enhance the database, allowing data entry and online corrections, indexing and searching, and the creation of an Internet forum regarding the catalogue. Another aim is to complete the records with manuscript collections in other Romanian Libraries and allow the insertion of images and metadata in the OMC corpus.

1.4. The Project also concerns the creation of teaching materials and educational courses using the data in the OMC corpus. We welcome collaboration in this and other similar projects focusing on making manuscript materials, texts and images accessible online. We shall be happy to work in association with other projects addressing similar issues and are open at all times to suggestions and co-operative research initiatives.

2. The Platform

2.1. The projected website aims to draw up an online catalogue of Oriental manuscripts in Romanian Libraries. It is intended to be an open source of information for other parties interested in working alongside with the OMC consortium. As such, it will comprise various types of information about Oriental manuscripts that could be of interest to other users. Moreover, OMC covers a wide range of topics (digital library, metadata management, distributed systems), which implies that a large variety of documents will be generated as part of the projected work.

2.2. Most importantly, we expect that the progress of the work and the interest of foreign users will dramatically influence the operation and increase the benefits provided by the project.

The database will be arranged by manuscript item and by illustration (if applicable). A manuscript is defined as an item with individual access number in a library, and may therefore be either a bound codex or a single sheet.

Manuscripts will be described, whenever possible, stating their origin, date, and place of creation, by the number of folios they comprise, incipit and explicit, size of the folio and text block. Similarly, each illustration in a manuscript will be identified by its folio number, title of the miniature, artist's name and miscellaneous notes.

Dates are given according to the Islamic calendar and also converted into the equivalent AD date.

It will be necessary to establish a way of recording AD dates either by century, with margins of uncertainty (such as early, middle or late, or first quarter, last quarter, etc.), or within a range of dates, as determined from the style or the known periods in which certain copyists were active.

2.3. As with all collection and manuscript entries, notes will be provided concerning the subject, title, and author. These notes will be standardized and readily available.

For the beginning, it is assumed that most researchers will wish to view individual manuscripts or to compare divisions or poems in different manuscripts. It is intended that in the future it will be possible to structure the information in such a way as to allow an interactive connection with the database. It remains a matter for discussion how far the subdivision needs to be taken, and which information is considered useful, so as to be subsequently recorded in the online catalogue.

2.4. Considering the introduction the website development team selected a list of open source components and systems to use in order to host and operate the site.

2.5. Functionality

The site provides the following classes of functionality:

2.6. Access Levels

The site allows three classes of access: administrator, author and user. Here is a description of each class:

Administrators

Administrators will be able to carry out the following operations:

Authors

Authors will be able to carry out the following operations:

Users

Users will be able to carry out the following operations: