UCLA wins a CLIR grant to digitize 800 Islamicate manuscripts

UCLA Library — home to North America's second-largest Islamicate manuscript collection — has won a CLIR Digitizing Hidden Collections grant, funded by the Mellon Foundation, one of just 16 recipients chosen from 159 applications. Over three years the library will digitize roughly 800 manuscripts spanning nearly a millennium (1100–1930) and a geography running from North Africa and the Balkans through the Middle East to Central and South Asia. Two design choices deserve attention. First, the grant is a step toward a much larger institutional goal: individually describing and conserving all 10,000 bound volumes in the collection so that students, scholars and heritage communities anywhere can use them. Second, access is being engineered, not assumed — the library will build grades 6–12 learning modules aligned to California's history and social-science standards, working with local educators and a local Islamic school, the Institute of Knowledge. Digitization projects usually stop at the scholar's desktop; this one wires primary sources into the school curriculum. That pairing — preservation capacity plus deliberate pedagogy — is how a manuscript tradition stays a living inheritance rather than a locked cabinet.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at UCLA Library: https://www.library.ucla.edu/about/news/ucla-library-awarded-clir-grant-islamic-world/.