SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

The Coptic Digital Library (CDL) (1) Coptic Microfilm Collection (CML) (1) (by Hany N. Takla)

Introduction: The Society has continually strived to collect and make available the original written sources of our Coptic Heritage. These written sources or manuscripts that primarily originated in Egypt are now scattered beyond the boundaries of Egypt into many repositories, spread throughout the world. The Society since its inception in 1979, pursued a course of securing copies of these manuscripts. From the beginning it was decided that 35-mm microfilm is the preferred storage medium due to its economy of space as well as of the cost. Throughout the 1980s and the early years of 1990's the Society acquired the majority of its holdings, currently numbering over 240,00 microfilm/microfiche frames. The Society in a separate venture also microfilmed, in microfiche cards, many of the published resources needed for Coptic Studies. Evolution of the collection: The collection began in early 1980 with the acquisition of microfilm copies of four Coptic Old Testament codices from the British Library in London. It was not until 1984 that the next acquisition was made, and it was from the Pierpont Morgan collection. By 1985, the Society began to make the acquisitions by topics. In general, the Old Testament, Bohairic and other dialects, were acquired first followed by Liturgical, Literary, Hagiographic, Lexicographic, and finally the New Testament. The 1992 acquisition of a large portion of the microfilms of Biblical and Liturgical manuscripts from the Coptic Museum, through the good offices of Brigham Young University, brought a significant number of Arabic Christian manuscripts into the collection. In the following years many Christian Arabic manuscripts were added, predominantly from the Paris Bibliotheque Nationale Collection. As it stands now, the collection includes virtually all the Coptic (non-papyri) manuscripts of Oxford's Bodleian Library, the majority of the Coptic Literary manuscripts from the National Library of

Austria along with the majority of the Coptic manuscripts housed in the Vatican Apostolic Library, the London British Library, and the Paris Bibliotheque Nationale among others. All in all, the Collection represents one of the best resources for the study of the Coptic Heritage worldwide. Preparation of the Collection for Use: With such volume of resources, a format was needed to facilitate the use of these manuscripts for transcribing, collation, and study. The Society, following the example set by Prof. Orlandi in Rome with the manuscripts of the White Library, arranged the 35-mm and the 16-mm microfilm reels into a 4x6-inch microfiche cards. Much of the collection was converted to this format, producing over 17,000 35-mm and 1400 16-mm microfiche cards. The originals of these are kept in a special storage cabinet at the Society's Los Angeles Center. Users of the Center's Library, utilized copies of these microfiche cards. However there was a significant number of reels that were not converted to this format because of time-constraints. Also there was no economical way to make paper prints of such images. With the rapid advances in personal computers and the limitations posed by the use of microfiche, it was contemplated to digitize the collection. The first approach included the conversion of the microfiche frame into a video image which was subsequently converted to a digital format, using a video capture PC board. This method produced images with limited resolution especially at higher screen magnification. The second approach used a transparency scanning setting on a flatbed scanner. This also produced similar results. The third approach involved the use of a dedicated film scanner. Such approach produced images with satisfactory resolution but they were cumbersome to handle due to their large size.

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

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