The digital selection
Princeton’s Manuscripts of the Islamic World presents digitized selections from its manuscript collections. The collection description links their beginnings to the manuscripts collected and donated by Robert Garrett. The images available online are a selection from the holdings, rather than a complete substitute for them.
A 2005 institutional account describes a programme to make manuscripts more accessible through cataloguing and digitization. It identifies a broad range of subjects, including law and jurisprudence alongside literature, science and other fields. That breadth is useful context for a legal historian searching the collection.
How a collection changes the questions
A collection has an acquisition history as well as a textual history. Those histories can intersect: the works a collector could acquire, the descriptions supplied by a dealer and the categories used by a later catalogue all affect the corpus a researcher encounters. None is a transparent record of everything once written or circulated.
The digital selection introduces another layer. A work can be present in the catalogue but absent from the online images. A researcher counting digitized examples should therefore identify the basis of the count. It could describe the available digital sample without describing the library’s entire collection, still less the historical prevalence of the text.
From availability to comparison
The practical benefit of digitization is the opportunity to compare identified copies without treating them as identical. Opening and closing matter, marginal material, changes of hand and the boundaries between works can all become questions for a closer examination. Catalogue and image should remain linked throughout that work.
An account of a legal text can use the collection history to explain how its evidence was assembled. State which copies were located, which were inspected and which could not be consulted. This produces a research corpus whose limits are intelligible and whose contents can be extended when another reader finds a further witness.
References
- Princeton: Manuscripts of the Islamic World
Digitized selections from collections that include the manuscripts assembled by Robert Garrett.
- Princeton: Making Islamic manuscripts more accessible (2005)
A dated institutional account of cataloguing, digitization and the collection's range of subjects.
Filed under Manuscripts & history. Sources and corrections.