Секция I
6
Alexander Matveev (FAAS, SPbSU, St. Petersburg)
Project for Electronic Publication of Muslim Manuscripts
Collection of the first Dean of the Faculty of Oriental Studies
of SPbU A. K. Kazembek (1802–1870) in the Oriental
Department of the Scientific Library of SPbSU
The purpose of the paper is to present a project of electronic publication of
Muslim (mostly Arabic) Manuscripts collection belonged to the first Dean of
the Faculty of Oriental Studies of the St.Petersburg University A. K. Kazem-bek
(1802–1870), which is kept now in the Oriental Department of the Library of the
Faculty of Asian and African Studies at St.Petersburg State University. This is a
major collection of this kind in the Library, it includes 179 Mss. containing c. 250
different works. The project is a continuation of the major project of describing
and publishing MuslimMss. of the Library, which had been started some years ago
by the electronic publication of the Arabic Mss. collection of Sheikh al-Tantawi
(1810–1861), accomplished in 2010–2011.
The current project includes the following tasks:
1. Developing software (using standard MS Office program — MS Access) for
publishing manuscripts in the digital form, together with their description, which
contains all necessary codicological and bibliographical information about the
manuscripts and works they contained.
2. Describing and electronic publishing of the Mss. of collection using developed
software (Access database), which encompasses:
Studying and describing manuscripts;
•
Scanning manuscripts, converting them into.pdf form and making digital
•
books;
Publishing digitalized manuscripts and their descriptions in the MS Access
•
database.
3. Studying the personality of A. K. Kazem-bek as a scholar and an individual,
as well as his Mss. collection in general.
4. Publishing in user-friendly form on DVD the digitalized manuscripts of Kazem-
bek’s collection with their detailed descriptions and search facilities.
Another objective of the paper is to talk about the very principles of electronic
publication of Arabic script Mss. in general, using the experience received by
the Faculty team in course of working with the above SPbU Library collections.
Now, when publishing of large amounts of Arabic script Mss. became technically
possible, it is time to start wide discussion of general principles for such
publishing, with a view to develop
internationally
accepted
standards
for such
publications, in order to make results of different and numerous international
projects compatible.
