The First Islamic Manuscript Conference
4-6 July 2005, King's College, University of Cambridge
The Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation in association with the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge will host a conference entitled The Islamic Manuscript: Conservation, Cataloguing, Accessibility, Copyright and Digitisation from 4th-6th July 2005 at King's College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
This conference will address some of the issues related to the conservation and accessibility of the immensely rich corpus of Islamic manuscripts to be found across the world in public and private collections. In the absence of comprehensive catalogues, the very existence of many manuscripts is a well-kept secret. In many parts of the world, lack of funding means that they are in a poor and deteriorating condition. However, even when manuscripts are well-preserved and catalogued, their rarity and fragility often present serious problems of access for scholars. It is the aim of this conference to assess the current state of Islamic manuscripts and to explore how modern technologies in general and digitisation in particular can assist in the conservation of manuscripts, render them more accessible to scholars and offer new tools for codicology and textual criticism. The organisers intend the conference to act as the basis for the creation of an international association to facilitate the digitisation, accessibility and study of Islamic manuscripts. Papers presented at the conference will likely be published as the first issue of a journal to be prepared by this new association. We welcome the participation of scholars, libraries, museums, research centres and other organizations and institutions interested in manuscript and book studies, literacy, the transmission of knowledge and related disciplines. Judging from the early response to our invitations, we look forward to hosting a large number of the most important representatives from these fields. The names of participating individuals and institutions will be announced shortly. The working languages of the conference will be Arabic, English, Persian and Turkish.