The goal for this multimedia online archive is to provide students and researchers with free access to 50-100 high digital quality scans, translations, transliterations, and recitations of religious and poetic texts in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, Persian, and other Turkic or Persianate languages. The website will eventually include audio files of their spoken and/or sung performances and it will be up and running by September 30, 2008, it will be available continually, for anyone with access to the UC system.
The Benefit
The collection will offer lively and engaging ways of working with a wide
variety of poetry. In addition to the original poems, translations, transliterations,
recitations, music, and some critical comments and/or comparative studies
and related research materials. The site will be browseable and searchable,
and it will also include instructional material for students to train
them in editorial and research skills.
The Future
The development of the Collection will allow remote contributions of digital
objects to the collection, thus releasing material which up to now has
been stored by individuals inaccessible to scholars. We will also invite
users to submit digital objects to increase the contextual information
(eg photographs from the period, postcards, letters; and typed memoirs).
We see this as a powerful means of building the archive and making use
of the Internet's ability to tap into amateur digitization and bring together
unknown collections.
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