DIGITALIZATION OF 500-YEAR-OLD KORAN

One of the world's most important and largest Korans is being digitized and made accessible to Islamic scholars everywhere, after being hidden away in a Manchester library for more than a century. Due to its age and size, the book is too fragile to be moved around or studied in detail. But now it is being digitized by a photographer, and will soon be available on the Internet. The so-called Koran of Kansuh al-Ghuri is the size of a large flat screen TV, measuring nearly one meter across (3.3 feet) and weighing 52 kilos (115 pounds). Islamic scholars have called it one of the most magnificent copies of the Koran in existence. The over 500-year-old manuscript has been stored at Manchester's John Rylands Library since 1901 and few have had the chance to study it in detail because of its fragility. The digitization of the book has been carried out by the library's photographer James Robinson, who has taken high-resolution photographs of each of its nearly 1,000 pages in a process he called both rewarding and challenging. When the digital copy of the Koran is published online, scholars and others will have full access to it from anywhere in the world. The full Kansuh al-Ghuri Koran will be available later this year at www.library.manchester.ac.uk, but parts of it can already be studied on a blog about the ongoing digitalization process, at www.gatewaytothekoran.wordpress.com.