Kairawan: an open-access federated search index for Arabic and Islamic manuscripthttps://orcid.org/register

I am writing to introduce Kairawan (kairawan.org), an open-access search index for Arabic and Islamic manuscripts. The platform federates catalog records from nine institutional sources into a single unified search, currently covering approximately 270,000 records across the global Arabic-script manuscript corpus.

Catalogs presently indexed include the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich), Princeton University Library (Garrett Collection and related Islamic holdings), the Vatican Apostolic Library (DigiVatLib), the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (vHMML Reading Room), the West African Arabic Manuscript Database at UC Berkeley, Fihrist (UK union catalog), the Princeton Geniza Lab, and the Gunnar Jarring Collection at Lund University Library. Every record links back to its source catalog, preserves attribution, and respects each collection's stated license terms. Metadata harvesting uses OAI-PMH where available, IIIF Presentation manifests where exposed, and source-specific REST endpoints otherwise.

The project is a non-profit volunteer initiative aimed at researchers and practitioners in manuscript discovery, cross-collection cataloguing, and tahqiq. The platform is built around shared citable canonical URLs per record, schema.org structured data for academic discovery layers, and an open REST API for downstream research tooling. We are working toward an editorial framework with scholarly review of contributed transcriptions, currently in design phase.

I would value feedback from this list on three fronts:

1. Metadata quality and completeness as you encounter records from your own collections (corrections welcome).
2. Suggested additional catalogs to federate, with priority on openly-licensed sources.
3. Interest in formal partnership for institutions holding further catalogs that could be made accessible to researchers via the index. Partnership terms and the deliverables we commit to in return are at kairawan.org.

With thanks for your time and any pointers you might share with colleagues in the field.