Building Digital BridgesWellcome Arabic Manuscripts:

Wellcome Library

• One of the world’s major resources for the study of medical history

• 2.5 million books, journals, manuscripts, archives, films and pictorial works from the earliest times to the present day

• Global content (134 languages represented)

• Based in London and part of the Wellcome Trust

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Successful Partnership

• Wellcome Library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina and King’s College London

• International partnership involving members of the World Digital Library

• Funded by JISC’s Islamic Studies Programme and the Wellcome Trust

• Long-term commitment

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Our Ambition• Provide free and easy global access to

valuable intellectual content• Create a virtual library with rich descriptive

information and detailed images of the objects

• Enable free reuse and repurpose of images under the Creative Commons Licence

• Develop a flexible and freely available cataloguing tool View…Master…Slide Master, to change this

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Content and Theme

• 500 Arabic manuscripts from 12th to 20th century held by the Wellcome Library

• From well-known medical texts by famous practitioners to texts by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies

• Representing great heritage of classical medicine in the Islamic world, from Southern Spain to South and South-east Asia

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Audience• Islamic studies specialists, in particular

scholars of Arabic medicine, science and history

• Scholars and cataloguing professionals working with manuscripts written in Arabic script

• Conservators, calligraphers, museum workers and others interested in ancient manuscripts as objects

Results?

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Cover-to-cover, high quality full colour digital images of 500 manuscripts

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A unique cataloguing tool• Simple and flexible, open source, uses

TEI P5 based XML schema• Enables linking between descriptive fields

and the corresponding text on the manuscript

• Able to reflect the richness of manuscript description

• Can be adapted to other languages and standards

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Rich descriptive metadata for over 400 manuscripts

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Website with a wealth of search features

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Browsing and Faceted Filtering

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Downloadable Content as PDF/JPEG

Zooming Endlessly

Associating metadata with the pages

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Comparing manuscripts side by side

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Ongoing work

• Metadata creation for the remaining manuscripts

• Posting remaining content on the website• Records conversion to MARC21• Publishing the cataloguing tool as open-source

software for authoring structured XML files• Advocacy of the metadata schema and

cataloguing practices

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Feedback so far• “The Arabic manuscripts website looks

superb.”• “Wow! This is an amazing resource.”• “The more I explore WACMP, the more

impressed I am.”• “The WAMCP Portal looks fabulous! The

amount of data put in and retrievable is awe-inspiring!”

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http://wamcp.bibalex.org