Qalamos Establishment of a union catalog of Oriental manuscripts by setting cataloging standards, conversion of printed catalogs, and integration of existing databases

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte; Dr. Klaus Ceynowa; Dr. Stefan Kühne
• Subject Area: Asian Studies ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 430973116

As one result of the first funding phase of the project "Orient-Digital" (now Qalamos), a new infrastructure is available since June 2022, providing direct access to metadata and to digitised material from a large number of oriental manuscript collections in Germany. Resulting from the cooperation of the project partners (SBB-PK, BSB, FB Gotha, URZ Leipzig) and in collaboration with 27 associated institutions, Qalamos currently presents approximately 136,000 manuscript records for more than 120,000 physical objects from Asian and African manuscript traditions in more than 160 languages and 80 scripts. The quality and number of entries is continuously improved through the retroconversion of the descriptive data and the integration of authority files. For the second phase of the project, the integration of description data from another 24 institutions is planned. Retroconversion, data import and maintenance will be extended to South Asian manuscripts, which are not yet accessible online. In addition, catalogues from the language groups Ethiopian, Coptic, Syriac and Armenian (Christian Orient) as well as Arabic, Persian and Ottoman-Turkish (Islamic manuscripts) will be included. In total, this will provide structured and standardised metadata of more than 32,000 manuscript descriptions. The migration of the KOHD-Digital database to Qalamos will enrich the evidence base with a further 25,100 descriptions. At the end of the second project phase, Qalamos would provide almost complete evidence of the Oriental manuscripts preserved in Germany. The central project goals for building a research-oriented database are: 1) an increased engagement in the field of authority files; and linking these data to other (normative) data repositories in close cooperation with the DNB and research institutions, 2) improvement of provenance-related research possibilities (data model for Geographica, visualisation of translocations), 3) further development of the IT infrastructure according to current research methods and standards in Digital Humanities. A central challenge of the project is the task of preparing Qalamos for a long-term and resource-optimised permanent service. The connectivity of the metadata to library applications (e.g. manuscript portal and discovery systems) as well as efficient routine operation of the data exchange play a key role in this.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)