CAIRO, July 3, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Scholars, calligraphers and librarians from across the globe are expected to converge Monday, July 4, on King’s College, University of Cambridge, for a four-day conference on the conservation and digitization of rare Islamic manuscripts.

The Islamic Manuscript: Conservation, Cataloguing, Accessibility, Copyright and Digitization conference is sponsored by the Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation (TIF) in association with the Center for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge.

“It is the aim of this conference to assess the current state of Islamic manuscripts and to explore how modern technologies in general and digitization in particular can assist in the conservation of manuscripts, render them more accessible to scholars and offer new tools for codicology and textual criticism,” the TIF said in a press release.

It said that the event is a bid to iron out obstacles to access manuscripts in libraries around the world as many catalogues are out of date and stored in poor conditions.

Chief among the invitees are Abdul Latif Jassim Kanoo, founder of the Bahrain-based Beit Al Qur’an; Youssef Ziedan, director of Manuscript Center and Museum at Bibliotheca Alexandrina; Mohamed Drioueche, the head of the Publications and Cataloguing Department at the US-based Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation; and Meral Alpay, director of Istanbul University Library.

The conference is also expected to see the birth of the Islamic Manuscript Association, which will help standardize Islamic manuscript cataloguing, access and charges, whilst protecting each institution’s legal rights.

“A further aim of this association is to assist its member institutions in fundraising for projects central to its work, which includes conservation, accessibility, cataloguing, digitization, library and information science education,” said the TIF's statement.

Papers presented at the conference will likely be published as the first issue of a journal to be prepared by this new association.

The Liechtenstein-based TIF is a non-profit educational trust established to advance, support and promote the protection, preservation, study and dissemination of the Islamic intellectual, cultural and artistic heritage.

It displayed in October of last year priceless pages of Mamluk masterpieces of the Noble Qur’an in a splendid digital form for the first time ever at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The manuscripts are digitized with the latest technologies in typesetting and printing to make them available world-wide on CDs and on the Internet.