The BYU-CUA Syriac Studies Reference Library: A Final Report
Carl W.
Griffin
Brigham Young University
Kristian S.
Heal
Brigham Young University
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2007
Vol. 10, No. 2
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv10n2prgriffinheal
Carl W. Griffin and Kristian S. Heal
The BYU-CUA Syriac Studies Reference Library: A Final Report
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol10/HV10N2PRGriffinHeal.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 10
issue 2
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Digitization
File created by XSLT transformation of original HTML encoded article.
[1] On June
20, 2001, representatives of The Catholic University of America
(CUA), Brigham Young University (BYU), and Beth Mardutho met
together to discuss the digital imaging of key holdings in the
Semitics/ICOR Library of CUA’s Mullen Library.
CUA’s Semitics/ICOR Library houses one of the largest
collections in the world of early and rare books on the
Christian East. All parties shared a particular interest in
early Syriac printed works, both for their continuing value to
contemporary Syriac Christian communities as well as to Syriac
scholars. Many early printed catalogs, text editions, grammars,
lexica, and other instrumenta and studies have never been
superseded. Their rarity and inaccessibility to scholars has
long been a serious problem for the field of Syriac
studies.
[2] The
faculty and staff of Catholic University recognized this need
as well, and generously agreed to work with BYU and Beth
Mardutho to provide digital access to their collection. BYU and
Beth Mardutho entered into a three-way agreement with CUA to
scan a broad selection of their Syriac book holdings, with BYU
focusing on titles of primarily academic interest and Beth
Mardutho on materials of more broad interest to the Syriac
churches. The result of the BYU project with CUA is now almost
complete, and Web access to the imaged titles is being provided
free of cost as the BYU-CUA Syriac Studies Reference Library at
http://www.lib.byu.edu/dlib/cua/.
A list of the titles included in this collection can be found
at the following BYU site: http://cpart.byu.edu/completed/referencelibrary.php.
[3] The
Semitics/ICOR Library houses some 45,000 books and periodicals,
20,000 of which were the bequest of CUA’s first great
semitist and orientalist, Prof. Henri Hyvernat. Much of the
cataloging of these early works has never been migrated to
computer, and a number of early Syriac titles had never been
cataloged at all. Fr. Matthew Streett, a doctoral candidate in
Biblical Studies at CUA, was appointed Project Bibliographer
and compiled a 400 page bibliography of Syriac materials in the
CUA collections. With this finding aid in hand, BYU and CUA
collaborated with Dr. David Taylor of the University of Oxford
to determine which items were of the highest academic value and
should be targeted by the project.
[4] A staff
of 14 technicians was assembled from the CUA libraries, the
School of Library and Information Science, and from graduate
academic departments and programs with an interest in Syriac,
with additional assistance from members of the Syriac Christian
community. A total of 667 books, articles, and other media were
scanned. The images scanned for BYU were returned to
BYU’s Harold B. Lee library and turned over to
specialists in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections imaging
lab. There the more than 30,000 images were individually split
and cropped, straightened, renamed, resized, sharpened,
converted to PDF, and tagged with metadata. Indexing
hierarchies were created and the images are being distributed
via the Web using CONTENTdm digital collection management
software. The images scanned by Beth Mardutho are also being
published on the Web by the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library
at http://www.hmml.org.
[5] Imaging
for BYU was done with a Zeutschel Omniscan 10000 TT color book
scanner tethered to a Windows PC, with a second PC used for
proofing and data backup on DVD. The Zeutschel book scanner is
capable of producing very high resolution scans with high color
accuracy, yet with a minimum of stress to a book or manuscript.
Images were captured at 600dpi in 24-bit color. While many of
the published images have been downsized, to facilitate Web
distribution and viewing, the resulting images are still very
high resolution and of superb quality.
[6] The
online collection may be navigated in three ways. From the
project's home page at http://www.lib.byu.edu/dlib/cua,
a drop-down menu allows the user to browse titles by ancient
author, or to simply browse all. A second drop-down menu allows
the user to browse by topic, or the user may search by keyword.
Each method will return a corresponding browse/search page
listing all of the titles that contain the selected keyword or
term in any of their metadata fields, and from this page one
may then view individual items.
[7] In the
item view, individual volume pages are viewable on the right.
On the left is a navigation pane that provides a hot-linked
table of contents which allows the user direct page-level
navigation. Each page is a separate Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file
which is viewed and manipulated via the Adobe Reader browser
plug-in. This allows the rapid download of individual pages and
offers the user a large degree of viewing control.
[8] Also
provided at the bottom of the navigation pane is a link to a
monolithic Acrobat file of the entire work. For large,
multi-volume works this file may be very large (500mb or
larger), but some users may wish to download frequently used
works for off-line access. The reason for the large file size
is the high resolution of the images, but the resulting detail
is spectacular. As high-speed internet connections become more
and more the norm these large file sizes will become
increasingly less consequential, but we have nevertheless
adopted here a content delivery system that is usable even with
dial-up access.
[9] From the
outset, this collaborative effort has aimed to make a
meaningful contribution to the growing body of Syriac materials
now freely available in electronic format. We hope this aim has
been met, and that the ease with which this particular
collection can now be accessed will be a boon to the field of
Syriac studies.