In 2005, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, chairman of Kingdom Holding Company, provided a $20 million endowment to Harvard University to establish an Islamic Studies Program (ISP). As part of that program, Harvard University has announced that the Islamic Heritage Project (IHP) is now online. ISP created the Islamic Heritage Project in collaboration with the Harvard University Library Open Collections Program (OCP) to share important aspects of the University’s intellectual wealth — specifically by developing a dynamic digital collection that supports teaching and research.
IHP is a collaboration between Islamic Studies scholars, librarians and curators which has cataloged, conserved and digitized Islamic manuscripts, maps and published texts from Harvard University’s collections. This unique online collection does not aim to duplicate individual collections of books or manuscripts. Instead, IHP offers a virtual collection of thematically linked material selected from numerous Harvard repositories. Harvard’s holdings of Islamic materials are distributed among several libraries and in the Harvard Art Museum. Houghton Library alone holds over 1,200 volumes of Islamic manuscripts representing 2,000 works, while Widener Library’s Middle Eastern Collection includes hundreds of thousands of published works.
IHP is fully Web-accessible and comprises more than 145,000 digital pages available to Internet users everywhere. Access IHP through http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ihp. Users can browse three basic genres — published materials, manuscripts or maps. Search is enabled through catalog records that detail the full IHP collection. A virtual keyboard allows users to enter queries and search terms in Arabic. IHP includes over 260 manuscripts, 270 printed texts and 50 maps. Complete reproductions of Islamic manuscripts and published texts within IHP date from the 13th to the 20th centuries and showcase the thought leaders of many nations including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. There are also regional treasures from North Africa and across Asia.
The collection is primarily made up of maps and texts originally produced in Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish; but Urdu, Chagatai, Malay, Gujarati, Indic languages and several Western languages are also represented. The collection covers a wide variety of topics and will even be of considerable interest to students and researchers outside the Islamic Studies field. Materials are presented on topics such as history, geography, law, astronomy, astrology, mathematics, medicine, poetry, literature, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, calligraphy, dictionaries, biographies and autobiographical works as well as religious texts and commentaries.