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UCLA Library has been awarded a $296,615 Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), a nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching and learning environments in collaboration with libraries and other institutions and communities of higher learning. The grant program is made possible by funding from the Mellon Foundation, and UCLA Library was one of 16 grant recipients selected out of 159 applications.
The CLIR grant will enable the Library to increase access to its significant collection of Middle Eastern and Islamicate manuscripts, the second largest collection of its kind in North America. The Library will partner with local educators and heritage communities to deepen understanding of primary source material and the Islamic world through the creation of learning modules for grades 6-12 that address California Common Core History-Social Science standards.
“CLIR’s Digitizing Hidden Collections grant acknowledges the significance and historical value of UCLA Library’s preeminent collections and reinforces and activates our commitment to make our rare and unique materials accessible not only to our campus, but to the broader Los Angeles communities we seek to enrich,” said Athena N. Jackson, the Norman and Armena Powell University Librarian at UCLA.
During the three-year grant period, the Library will digitize approximately 800 manuscripts from materials spanning nearly a millennium, from 1100 to 1930, and originating from North Africa, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and Central and South Asia. Distributed across 20 diverse sub-collections, the manuscripts include works by Muslims and non-Muslims in areas under Muslim rule and contain important records of religious, scientific, cultural and literary production across centuries. The project will use state-of-the-art digital tools to ensure that the centuries-long tradition of Islamicate manuscript scholarship is preserved for generations of students and scholars.
Harnessing expertise across UCLA and local Islamic communities, librarians and library staff with expertise in area studies, special collections, rare book cataloging, Islamicate manuscript culture, digital collection development, metadata creation, digital access, digital stewardship and paper conservation will collaborate with campus partners and a local Islamic school, the Institute of Knowledge. The group will jointly select and digitize the texts and create workshops and learning modules designed to develop historical thinking skills and analyze ancient civilizations for middle and high school students.
UCLA graduate student subject experts will assist the project. Collectively, they will ensure that UCLA Library’s broad holdings, including texts in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu and Pashto, can continue to provide an important window into the significant intellectual output and global impact of Muslim communities over nearly a millennia.
“The added value this project offers, beyond keeping pace with UCLA’s academic mission, is the opportunity, through campus expertise and partnerships with local Islamic communities, to open our collections to the most formative minds, to potential UCLA students and to future scholars of history,” Jackson said. “The more our youngest minds know about global histories and how they interconnect, the more ready they are to fully engage in the future, wherever it may lead. ”
The Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices grant will move the Library closer to its goal of individually describing and conserving the 10,000-bound manuscript volumes that comprise its Islamicate and Arabic-script manuscript collection to make these materials accessible to students, scholars, heritage communities and researchers worldwide. More information is available at UCLA Library Islamicate Manuscripts Initiative.
