São Paulo – Arab manuscripts that were inaccessible to the public have been digitalized and made available on the Internet to whoever wants to view them. A project financed by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) made it possible for three institutions to develop the method and put on the Internet documents dated from the 14th to 20th. The search may be in English or Arabic.
After two year’s work, researchers at Wellcome Library, in London, King’s College London and the Library of Alexandrina, in Egypt, created in July this year, a site with 500 Arab manuscripts and 75,000 images. Most of the documents discuss an area in which the Arabs advanced much from the end of the Roman Empire to the 15th century: medicine.
Viewers may see texts by doctor and philosopher Ibn Sinna (Avicenna), comments by other philosophers, like Averroes, medical poems by Avicenna and even philosophical and scientific works by anonymous researchers.
The digital consultancy director at the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, Simon Tanner believes that these studies helped medicine evolve. He said they may be reused at any moment. After all, according to Tanner, laboratories frequently research ancient documents in search of names of herbs used in the past or of a “route” that may result in the discovery of new drugs and cures to diseases.
“Our modern world of medicine can be better understood when we understand the importance of the Arabic world to medicine. From the fall of Rome until the European Renaissance of the 15th century, the Islamic world was the centre of medical knowledge. Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world (many Arabic medicinal terms–drug, syrup, alcohol, alkali, etc.–remain in western languages) and these manuscripts hold important historical and scientific insights into that period,” said Tanner.
The 500 digitalized manuscripts belong to Wellcome Library. According to the institution, digitalizing documents is part of a greater project and comprehends other collections it owns. Some of the Arab documents include medical manuscripts that belonged to Lebanese physician and medical historian Sami Ibrahim Haddad (1890-1957) and include the “Haddad Manuscript Collection”. The collection also includes texts by Islamic authors like Al-Majusi, Ibn Sina and even Jewish authors who wrote in Arabic.
Wellcome Library was responsible for managing the project. The institution supplied the documents, catalogued and reproduced the images. The Library of Alexandria developed the software to place the documents on the Internet and now hosts the site from which they may be visited. King’s College of London was responsible for the creation of technical specifications to place the documents on the Web, the adaptation of the system to show the digital files and supply technology for presentation on computers.
Tanner stated that the systems developed during the project could benefit other institutions. “The most important technology developed to make the manuscripts available was the work we did to catalogue the manuscripts. At first, this might not seem as exciting as the imaging, but images are not useful if they cannot be found and used. Without the new model, what we have called the Arabic ENRICH schema, we could not show the manuscripts in the correct structure nor represent the various types of script used by the scribes. This new technological step is now freely available for other libraries, archives and projects to use,” he said.
The researchers used a digital camera capable of capturing the images with ten times more detail that SLR (reflex) cameras, which already produce higher quality images.
To the researcher, however, the main conquest of the project is to make available to the public texts that have restricted access, as some manuscripts are deteriorated and cannot be manipulated. “Providing global access to this collection is at the heart of our mission in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London to foster collaborative research and to democratise access to these treasures so that everyone can view them if they wish,” said Tanner.
*Translated by Mark Ament
