„WAAMD is a bi-lingual database that was developed at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s to describe a collection of Arabic manuscripts in southern Mauritania (Boutilimit). It subsequently has been used to compile a union catalogue of other West African collections, including manuscript libraries in West Africa, Europe and the United States.
Since 2008 print catalogues from West Africa published by al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation have been incorporated, and beginning in 2018 inventories from the SAVAMA-DCI project in Timbuktu are being added.
This is a work in progress that will be expanding as additional library data from West Africa is being made available. WAAMD is hosted by the Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
The database software was re-written in 2017/18 and is now comprised of five interactive data sets: the manuscript records, their authors, the authors’ nisbas, subjects, and the collections themselves. It has a search engine designed to identify manuscripts and authors when only fragmentary information is available, in Arabic or Latin characters or a combination of both. Where digital images of manuscript texts are available, url links to the images appear in the records.
The database is publicly available at no cost to users; and the WAAMD cataloguing app is free to be downloaded for local use. Thirty-odd fields in Arabic and English cover all the descriptors normally employed in manuscript work and users may customize the input fields for the needs of particular collections. We encourage the inclusion of newly-catalogued material into the main database and ask readers to contact the editors to help facilitate this.“
Die Datenbank ist online frei verfügbar.