The UCLA Library Special Collections, in collaboration with the Islamic Studies program, has launched a manuscript cataloguing project. UCLA has the second largest Islamic manuscript holdings in North America (around 10,000 manuscripts) but they did not have a digital catalogue for this collection until now. The Islamic Manuscripts Initiative is going to be a multi-year effort to catalogue and digitise these manuscripts. The project aims to perform two tasks with the database that we have created so far:
1. Data visualization: We hope to visualize the manuscript database we have so far using Tableau. So far, no one has looked at this data in any comprehensive manner to draw insights regarding where these manuscripts are coming from, when they were produced, the topics they cover, their physical attributes, etc.
2. Search tool: Right now, the only way to search through the digitized records is the library catalogue, which only has a limited number of search options (author, title, publisher, etc.). The ability to explore a collection by periods, topics, physical attributes, etc., can be really useful for researchers.