Here's a list of work on digital collections happening now or about to begin...

If you have any questions or want to learn how to add to "The Q", please send email to: michael.dula@yale.edu .

Here's a list of digitization activity from 2012-2013...

If you have any questions or want to learn how to add to "The Q", please send email to: elizabeth.beaudin@yale.edu .

Arcadia Year 4 Digitization Projects

As stated in the "Yale University Library Annual Report to Arcadia Year 3" delivered in September 2012, three new digitization projects will take place in Year 4 (September 2012-August 2013):

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1. Digitization of Han Nôm Handwritten and Woodblock Manuscripts Held in the Maurice Durand Collection

In 1967, the Yale University Library’s Southeast Asia Collection acquired the private collection of Maurice M. Durand, director of École Française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi from 1947 to 1957, and a well-known scholar, author, and translator of Han Nôm during his lifetime. The collection contains 197 handwritten and woodblock texts in Han Nôm, a writing method for the Vietnamese language adapted from, and incorporating pure and/or modified Chinese characters developed in the 13th century and used up until the 20th century. The focus of this effort is to create metadata based on the finding aid for the collection, assess material for conservation, digitize the Han Nôm manuscripts and notebooks housed in this collection, and present them through the Library’s website.

2. Enriching, Enhancing, and Connecting Yale’s Digital Collections: Yale Persian Collection

Based on lessons learned in the Joel Sumner Smith Arcadia project, Yale Library IT will create a specialized repository for similar digital collections of international materials. This project will select Persian titles, especially those out-of-copyright in the old Yale classification, since many have minimal cataloging and thus low discoverability. The project team will create full level MARC records for the included volumes, identify and execute any necessary preservation, create digital images using external vendors, and ingest images and metadata into the digital collections repository for use by researchers worldwide through the Library’s website.

3. Arabic and Persian Medicine: Middle Eastern Texts in a Western Collection

While Yale’s Medical Historical Library is primarily known for its Western emphasis, it also has an important collection of early Arabic and Persian medical manuscripts and books that are underutilized and unknown to scholars who might not think to look for this collection at Yale. This collection reflects the Arabic and Persian intellectual efforts that translated, augmented, and transmitted Greek and Roman medical knowledge to Western societies during the Renaissance. It includes iconic works by authors such as Avicenna and al-Razi. The team will extract existing MARC records from ORBIS representing approximately 25,000 pages, convert these records to the Dublin

Core format, digitize and ingest the page images and metadata into the AMEEL collection, an existing digital repository of academic resources focusing on the Middle East.[1]

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