Over the past three years the Free Library of Philadelphia, Columbia University Libraries, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, and a number of other Philadelphia partners have worked to make their collective holdings of Islamicate manuscripts available to the public online. Thanks to funding from a Council on Library and Information Resources Digitizing Hidden Collections grant and the hard work of many across these institutions, the project is now complete with 684 manuscripts covering more than 900 years of cultural production across four continents available online to the world for the first time.

On July 14th we will be holding an afternoon symposium to celebrate this milestone and highlight some of the findings from the project. Speakers from all three institutions will discuss the process of cataloging and making these manuscripts available, some of the research highlights uncovered in the process, engagement plans with the collection, as well as future programs made possible by the digitization work.