The National and University Library in Sarajevo, and numerous other libraries in Bosnia-Herzegovina, use the COBISSS library automation system that was developed and is maintained by IZUM, which is associated with the University of Maribor in Slovenia.  It meets all national standards, has multilingual/multi-script capabilities, and is used in libraries in 9 countries in the region (www.cobiss.net). 

 

 

Professor Ian M. Johnson

Joint Editor

Libri: international journal of libraries and information services

The Robert Gordon University

Aberdeen

Great Britain

 

Phone: 01224 740785

Mobile: 07719 859239

 

Libri

Submissions: http://journals.uic.edu/libri

Reading: http://librijournal.org

 

 

 

 

 

Dear colleagues

During your last Berlin conference last week, I was in Sarajevo, and was invited to visit the Gazi Husrev Beg Library and talk to the staff about their various digitisation and cataloguing projects. It was an interesting visit, where I met with the Director, Dr Mustafa Jahic, who told me about these projects, and the problems they have cataloguing multi-script, multi-language, and multi-cultural manuscripts and archives. Some of you may have visited this Library during your Sarajevo conference in 2007.

The Library has 10,000 mss in Arabic, Bosnian, Persian and Ottoman Turkish. I was told that the distinguishing factor of this collection, unlike others in the West, is that there is a significant number in Bosnian, i.e. arising out of their own heritage. They have microfilmed and digitised them. With the help of al-Furqan Foundation they have published 17 vols of these catalogues. The catalogue is also available on CD. They have also embarked on an ambitious project to catalogue all Bosnian manuscript collections in the country, incl. those held in private collctions. They have already made some progress doing that.

For cataloguing the manuscripts they have used 2 locally developed programmes. To begin with they have used 'Filemaker' program, where both Arabic and Latin characters appear on the same catalogue record. However it is not possible to manipulate the data. To address this problem they are now using a Slovenian program, but again retrieval is difficult. This is called T Facit V2. They would like advice on:

A cataloguing program that would allow multi-script and multi-lingual cataloguing on the same catalogue record,
Making the catalogue generally available on line, protecting their copyright, and
the eternal problem of finding external funds to realise these ambitious projects.

I did say that these were common problems, still being grappled with, latest with Unicode, that there are numerous ongoing digitisation projects that are dealing with similar problems. And that having been out of professional networks for sometime, I would ask for the help of colleagues working in this field.

While other national collections were destroyed during the war, this collection survived intact by constantly being moved to eight different locations in the city. Here is the weblink to the Library, but unfortunately it is only in Bosnian. However, if you go to the 'Photo Gallery' there are a few images of introductory paragraphs in English. http://www.ghbibl.com.ba/index.php?lang=ba

For background information, and to demonstrate its significance, the Library was founded in 1537 by Gazi-Husrev-Beg, and is said to hold one of the most important collections of Islamic mansucripts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including a number originally donated to it by him. The library also holds significant collections of books, journals, newspapers, documents and photographs. In the next year or so, the Library will be moving to new purpose-built premises, the first in Bosnia.

I would very much appreciate hearing what advice and pointers you would give this Library. It would be good to have them on this list, and I would coordiante a response. For those interested in making direct contact with Dr Mustafa Jahic himself, here are his contact details. [log in to unmask], or [log in to unmask]

Very best wishes
Meline Nielsen