Digital Islam

Their report, User Requirements for Digitised Resources in Islamic Studies, outlines the results of an investigation into how Islamic Studies scholars use the web and other electronic resources for research.

The project was funded by JISC, the Joint Information Systems Committee following the Government’s designation of Islamic studies as a strategically important subject. Findings from the report will be passed to government later in the year.

The study shows that around 10,000 Arabic and Persian texts are available online, but are difficult to retrieve and access. The report recommends creating a central portal on the internet, leading scholars and students to a broad range of Islamic Studies texts. The study also suggests that more Islamic websites archive material, which is often only available for a short period of time. Researchers argue that this would help academics studying a growing subject as well as benefiting the UK’s Muslim community.

Islamic Studies was broadly defined and included Islamic History, Art, Law, Philosophy, Science, Finance, Sociology and Modern Islamic Thought and Politics. The researchers from IAIS identified what existing digitised resources were available for Islamic Studies and analysed how they are being used. Librarian in Middle East Studies at the University of Exeter, Paul Auchterlonie led this part of the project. This involved looking at reading lists from libraries and universities around the country and by examining recently completed doctoral dissertations. Major reference works and databases such as the Encyclopaedia of Islam and Index Islamicus already available in digitised form were used as a basis for the research.

This also required the project to identify gaps in resources and establish criteria to prioritise potential collections and materials for digitisation.

The research team then established which books were most heavily used, and whether they should be on a priority list for digitisation; ultimately making the books cheaper and more readily available to students and scholars through an online format. However, the results of the survey showed grave difficulties in deciding which books would be appropriate for digitisation as there were no common denominators used across the various Islamic Studies programmes.

Paul Auchterlonie said, ‘We also focused on discovering what UK researchers and teachers of Islamic Studies would like to see digitised in their field; whether in the form of e-books, Islamic manuscripts, audio-visual or more major reference works.’

The research showed that although around 10,000 texts in Arabic and Persian are available online, they can be extremely difficult to locate and it is even harder to know what is available in other Islamic languages. With a recommendation for an online portal, including a digital repository for research as well as a link to primary texts in Islamic studies; Paul elaborated on the reports proposals, ‘If areas were searchable by author and title with links to relevant websites it would make a significant difference; especially if it was available to both UK Higher Education and the UK Muslim community. This would eliminate the need to digitise the texts themselves and create a wealth of invaluable and at present underused research material.’

Research findings also found that the use of websites was very high with over 94% of respondents using websites produced by Islamic organisations in English, though as with the books, there was not a single portal that stood out as particularly significant. University Librarian for the Arab World Documentation Unit and the Digital Assets Manger, Ahmed Abu-Zayed said, ‘We recommend the archiving of websites of UK Islamic organisations as an aid to scholarship, as many of the sites have a limited life which makes it hard to document and use as a reference. It would also be a means of preserving the heritage of the UK Muslim community.’ Ahmed added that a retrospective digitisation project for UK PhD theses in Islamic Studies is also recommended.

The initiative in the fast developing field of digitisation also highlights the University’s strengths in Arab and Islamic Studies following the incorporation of the holdings of the University's Middle Eastern Collections into COPAC, the union catalogue funded by JISC and the Research Libraries UK (formerly CURL). This inclusion will enable the University to further profile the extensive and unique resources of the University Library to other research libraries, scholars and members of the public interested in Arab and Islamic Studies. The Middle Eastern collections comprise 60,000 volumes housed in the Old Library, and the extensive holdings of the Arab World Documentation Unit (AWDU), which range from newspapers, journals, and archival papers to government records, maps and over 800 films from the Arab world on video and DVD. Together the Old Library and AWDU house the largest contemporary collection of material on the countries of the Arabian Peninsula in the UK, while AWDU is also part of the national research resource for official publications from Arab countries.