AIC's 53rd Annual Meeting

Northwestern University Libraries (NUL) is home to over 3,000 Arabic script materials from West Africa. Part of the Herskovits Library of African Studies, these manuscripts come primarily from northern Nigeria and cover subjects including history, theology and astronomy. Most are Arabic, but some are Ajami – non-Arabic languages written in Arabic script. The size, scope and uniqueness of these underrepresented collections, along with increasing global scholarly interest, make them a priority for conservation and digitization. In collaboration with curatorial, cataloging, and digitization staff, the NUL Preservation Department has established standardized protocols to survey, house, treat, and – using a VSC®80 forensic questioned document examination workstation – capture a range of multispectral images (MSI) that are integrated into the digital repository, adding a degree of materiality to the imaged West African manuscripts.  

Paden 417 (مختصر في فروع المالكية), a copy of the “Mukhtasar” of Khalil b. Ishaq b. Musa al-Jundi, a fourteenth-century handbook of Maliki legal principles, is one of the oldest, largest and most complex manuscripts we have worked on and serves as a case study. It is comprised of 230 individual leaves of handmade paper contained in a later leather wrapper. The primary text is written in neatly ruled lines using brown and red inks, with commentaries and annotations filling virtually all other areas of the paper in brown and black inks. The paper is brittle and discolored, with extensive losses along the edges. In preparation for imaging, the manuscript received over 300 hours of treatment from ten different current and former staff members. Our collaborative approach is not unique to this object, but it was critical for addressing the challenges presented by Paden 417, which would have been daunting and laborious for a solo conservator.  

Many of the Arabic manuscripts lack colophons or other means cataloguers use to establish clear provenance, so to understand their history and production, we must rely on the physical objects. NUL purchased a VSC®80, which allows us to quickly and consistently capture and annotate a wide range of MSI of watermarks, inks, ruling lines, and other materiality of the manuscripts.  

As one exciting example of how MSI may be used, portions of Paden 417, along with a selection of MSI files, were recently examined by scholars at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures in Hamburg, Germany. Although they had actual manuscript pages, the enhanced images of the watermarks allowed them to date the manuscript to the mid-16th century, making this one of the earliest written examples of Hausa Ajami.  

As of this writing, Paden 417 has been treated, housed, and VSC®80 images of select pages have been captured.  Digitization is underway and collation of this fragile object will follow. We anticipate that the manuscript and associated MSI will be publicly available in the digital repository by early 2025. Incorporating MSI into our digital repository augments the standard digital images, opens the door to scholarship worldwide and presents future opportunities for collaboration on machine learning and generative AI initiatives.