Generic Open-Source Solutions for Managing Manuscripts A-Z
Constellation E: Monday, October 31, 2:00 – 3:00PM
Manuscripts are associated with a rich description which needs to be cataloged
for preservation and ease of accessibility in a comprehensible format. One of
the complexities of cataloging manuscripts is attributed to the available
standards which are usually not tight to fit for a specific data model.
Another aspect is that those thousand-year old manuscripts were written using
old forms of languages that cannot be made searchable using current tools.
Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) has designed and implemented a new approach for
facilitating the cataloging, searching and viewing of collections of ancient
Arabic manuscripts, provided by Wellcome Trust. Those manuscripts contain
special characters that were used for representing Arabic language at the
time. Our approach imposes building a structured schema-compliant records that
fits the desired data model. The schema drives an authoring tool, which
generates records with the desired structure via its automatically generated
human friendly metadata forms. The generated records are checked against the
selected standard to insure compliance, which follows in our use case the TEI
P5 standard. The new approach is flexible in the sense that changes to the
data model are seamlessly reflected to the structure of the records, and
generates forms without the need for adding or editing a single line of code.
The approach also provides a solution for both cataloging using old characters
and searching manuscripts using modern and old characters. Our open source
solution is generic, flexible, scalable, extensible and can be adopted by
systems for any standard and any language. It allows searching, viewing,
comparing and downloading the manuscripts.
Session Leaders
Engy Ali Mohmed Morsy, Project Manager, ICT Department, Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Dr. Noha Adly, Deputy Head, ICT Sector, Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Dr. Magdy Nagi, Head of ICT Sector, Bibliotheca Alexandrina