A union catalogue of the written
religious and cultural heritage
of the Middle East
About us
AlKindi aims to become a scientific research tool on medieval religious and cultural heritage of the Middle East.
To do this, AlKindi data is structured and entered according to the recommendations of the new model received by the international library community (IFLA-LRM and RDA) and implemented by the Diamond-ILS application.
AlKindi is no longer just a simple directory of publications, but is enriched, daily, by new editorial data concerning the works of this heritage.
The works, intellectual creations, are placed at the center of a documentary system that includes not only their scientific editions but also their manuscripts, upstream, and their translations, downstream.
By systematically placing works at the center of research, AlKindi aims to describe the genealogy or literary descent of a medieval work through the links that the works foster between them.
Partners
1
Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies
The library of the Dominican Institute of Oriental Studies (IDEO, Cairo) specializes in the Arabic Islamic sources of the first millennium Hiǧrī.
The library is intended to cover all disciplines in the field of Islamic studies: Arabic language, Quranic exegesis, theology, law and jurisprudence, history, geography, philosophy, Sufism, science, etc. It offers more than 20,000 classical texts of the Arab-Islamic heritage, as well as scholarship in Arabic or European languages. Many PhD dissertations are also available on site. We try to acquire all of the ancient Arabic texts published within the entire Muslim world, from Morocco to India, as well as those published by Orientalists.
2
Institute of Arabic Manuscripts
The Institute of Arabic Manuscripts holds manuscripts,on microfilm or in digital format, that were gathered during reproduction campaigns in the world libraries, from its foundation in 1946 until present day. These reproductions are available in its office in Cairo.
The Institute of Arabic Manuscripts the specialized agency of the Arab world at the service of the manuscript heritage. Founded in 1946 as part of the Arab League, it was attached to the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) in the early 1970s. During its more than seventy years of existence, it has established and confirmed working methods on the classical heritage, both in theoretical and practical terms. The Institute has thus become a reference point in the Arab world, appreciated by specialists for the various services it offers in the field of classical Arab manuscript heritage: collection, communication, maintenance, restoration, cataloguing, publishing, study and publication.
3
Fscire, Palermo — “La Pira” Library
The Fscire Research Institute and Library on the History and Doctrines of Islam (Palermo) aims at representing the linguistic, doctrinal and cultural diversity of Islam.
The “Giorgio La Pira” Library and Research Center in Palermo is a branch of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies (Fscire) of Bologna, Italy. It focuses on the history and doctrines of Islam with the aim of representing its linguistic, doctrinal and cultural diversity. Founded in 2018, the Library already contains an important number of classical and modern books —result of donations and purchases— in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, besides various European languages. The Center aspires to make the city of Palermo an active meeting point for religious studies and comparative religions.
Projects
1
Mistara
Improve the quality of metadata relating to human beings in Arabic-written languages.
Project leader: Public interest group,University Library of Languages and Civilization (GIP BULAC).
Metadata describing resources in Arabic alphabet (Arabic, Persian, Urdu languages and Turkish-Ottoman mainly) have many anomalies related to the complexity of the onomastic system, phonetic or orthographic divergences between languages or coding errors. The project aims to improve entities describing individuals. It will cause the automatic alignment tools developed as part of the bibliographic transition for handle this type of metadata and non-Latin scripts. This metadata will be enriched by ensuring the alignment of catalog references (Idref first) with onomastic standards derived from research: AlKindi base (IDEO), Onomasticon Arabicum (IRHT).
In partnership with ABES, the BNF (Department of Metadata), Aix-Marseille University and the Mediterranean House of Human Sciences, the Dominican Institute for Oriental Studies (Cairo), the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (CNRS) and the Institute of the Arab World.
