The Yemen Manuscript Digitization Initiative (YMDI)

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The private libraries of Yemen comprise one of the world’s largest and most important collections of Arabic manuscripts. Because Yemen is relatively remote from the central lands of Islam, it has preserved many extremely rare sources, including some of the earliest extant Qur’an fragments and works of great importance for the study of classical Islam. Ready access to these largely neglected sources would generate a tremendous amount of new knowledge and provide new perspectives on the political, intellectual, and literary history of Islamic civilization. But this irreplaceable trove of manuscripts is threatened. In recent years, Yemen's private libraries have suffered great losses, in part due to Salafi extremists who are ideologically opposed to the Zaydi Shiite school of Islam and have targeted Zaydi manuscripts for destruction. The Yemen Manuscript Digitization Initiative (YMDI) is a collaborative project between Princeton University Library and the Freie Universität, Berlin. YMDI's mission is the preservation and dissemination of the Arabic manuscripts in the private libraries of Yemen. In the 28 month period covered by this grant, YMDI will accomplish three objectives.1. preserve three private libraries in Sana'a, a total of 236 manuscripts.2. digitize 12 additional manuscripts in the rare book collections of the Staatsbibliothek and the Princeton University Library.3. conjoin the digital-library infrastructure developed at Princeton to create a freely accessible repository of Islamic manuscripts whose scope is unparalleled in the world. YMDI has formed an advisory board comprised of leading scholars of classical Islam, Middle Eastern history, and Arabic Literature from North America, Europe, and the Middle East. In this, YMDI’s initial phase, YMDI will create an infrastructure through which manuscripts identified as important by its advisory board can be digitally preserved and disseminated in the coming years. By channeling and combining institutional resources which already exist, YMDI will help save a crucially important manuscript collection for Islamic civilization study that is in imminent danger.