A TEI P5 Manuscript Description Adaptation for Cataloguing Digitized Arabic Manuscripts

Mohammed Ourabah Soualah,Mohamed Hassoun

doi:10.4000/jtei.398

Abstract

It is incumbent upon libraries holding Arabic manuscripts to provide access to digitized surrogates of their holdings. Users require access both by authority list and by content. Thus, an exhaustive cataloguing method is essential. The TEI P5 Manuscript Description module is a suitable tool for manuscript cataloguing, but it lacks certain features that would allow for exhaustive description of ancient Arabic manuscripts. In this article we make several suggestions that would augment the TEI P5 Manuscript Description module allowing for a richer and more accurate description and cataloging of ancient Arabic manuscripts.

Highlights

Until the time when providing full text versions of the manuscripts is feasible, manuscript cataloguing proves to be a realistic solution for providing access, and it has proved extremely successful in several Arabic manuscript digitalization projects
21 Since we desire to describe each volume of a manuscript without repeating information, we propose that information common to all volumes be shared among all volumes and not repeated
48 In this work we show that the Manuscript Description module, with modifications, can be used for both Western medieval manuscripts and ancient Arabic manuscripts

Summary

Introduction

Current Methods for Providing Online Access to Digitized Arabic Manuscripts scholars because the text is not searchable It is still not practicable for the majority of institutions to provide fully searchable versions of these manuscripts as the recognition of manuscript handwriting is in an embryonic stage. Xml:lang="ara-Latn" defines Arabic language written in the Latin script This notation is simple and very useful, but it presents a semantic weakness, because its form does not contain any information about the transliteration system. This solution can be implemented as follows: 11 The use of which is an element of allows defining the language used in the TEI. We can use this element specificities to define the romanized form of a term as shown by the following example:

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion