Project: Orient-Digital
Old catalogues in a new guise
From summer 2020, the project with the working title "Orient-Digital" was under the leadership of the Berlin State Library, together with the Gotha Research Library, the Bavarian State Library in Munich and the Leipzig University IT Center.
This was a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) , initially limited to three years project designed to establish a Union catalogue and a new Portal for Oriental Manuscripts within Germany. The main goals of the project included the establishment of common indexing standards, the conversion of printed catalogues into electronic ones and the consolidation of all existing electronic records in a central system.
The "Orient-Digital" project teams began their work between June (Gotha), August (Berlin, Leipzig) and September (Munich). In total, at the various locations 8 project members who were supported by permanent employees.
Making valuable collections and cataloguing data more visible
Academic libraries in Germany are home to extensive and diverse collections of oriental manuscripts. They are an essential part of the written world heritage and are of the utmost importance as primary sources for various sciences. In an international comparison, the quality of the scholarly cataloguing of the collections in Germany is relatively high. However, the fact that the historical and more recent printed catalogues as well as the records in local library systems and isolated database applications are often difficult to access is a disadvantage for international research today.
The new funding project is intended to improve this situation by Metadata of Arabic, Persian and Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts into the "Orient-Digital" database and - where already available - links to digitised material will be created.
Co-operation partners throughout Germany
However, the project was not only intended to include the large collections of the above-mentioned applicants. The aim was also to offer smaller collections the infrastructure to present their holdings in a specialised and material-specific context. There were Co-operations with over 25 other institutions. Interested organisations are cordially invited to contact us.
At www.orient-digital.de the holdings of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin can currently be viewed; after the launch of the portal application in the first half of 2021, all holdings will be accessible under this URL. At the end of the project, references to around 22,000 manuscripts could be found in the portal. In a second project phase, the integration of further Asian and African language groups is planned.
Retro-conversion and standardisation
The basis of the retro conversion was the printed catalogues of the large and smaller collections. In the case of Berlin, these are 10 volumes for the Arabic manuscripts by Wilhelm Ahlwardt (published from 1887 to 1899), as well as one volume each on the Persian and Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts by Wilhelm Pertsch (published in 1888 and 1889). Pertsch also compiled the catalogues of the Gotha holdings of Arabic, Persian and Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts (published between 1859 and 1893). The BSB's manuscripts are recorded in Joseph Aumer's catalogue (published in 1866). What all catalogues have in common are the high indexing standards, which are still exemplary today.
The data from KOHD Digital were integrated into the new portal after the end of this project (2022) and thus made permanently available to users.
The standardisation of the personal data records and their comparison with the entries in the Common Authority File (GND) is of central importance when recording the catalogue data.
MyCoRe database
The IT infrastructure of the existing electronic catalogues of oriental manuscripts was developed by the Leipzig University Computer Centre The portal has been adapted to enable optimal data exchange and to be open to all interested institutions with collections of oriental manuscripts in the future. To this end, a central portal solution with a common index was set up to harmonise the currently different reference systems and data models, into which standardised data from other external systems can be integrated.
The activities were organised in close cooperation with the DFG-funded Manuscript portal to achieve the greatest possible standardisation of technical and library standards.
Research in the holdings
The holdings of the project partners in Gotha, Leipzig and Munich can be searched under the following links until the launch of the new portal. As this is an older project, some of the links no longer exist or will be redirected:
Gotha Research Library:
University of Leipzig:
Bavarian State Library, Munich:
Schematic overview of the future portal
