Making the Hidden Discoverable: The Story of the Mysterious Arabic Collection
October 24, 2022
Covers of some of the books being cataloged in DMS
Image of one of the bookplates found inside the Arabic books with the text "Edith Ainsfield Wolf Fund, Oberlin College Library"
Mary Church Terrell Main Library has been home to a collection of Arabic books that arrived at Oberlin in the 1970s. They found a new home in Mudd’s basement, where they swam in layers of dust until 2020, when they were excavated by the librarians. They found stacks of black or green leather-bound books; the occasional deep red color or illustrated cover would sometimes make an appearance as well.
No one really knew how these books came to Oberlin. Was there a specific purpose for the collection, or were they part of a bigger project that never saw the light? One speculation about the books is that they have either been purchased by the Edith Anisfield Fund or donated to Oberlin. We have attached a picture in the slideshow above of an Edith Anisfield Fund plate found inside one of the books' covers. What remains a mystery, however, is that the Oberlin College Archives have not been able to establish a concrete link to Edith Anisfield or the fund to Oberlin College. In an exchange of communication between the libraries' Discovery and Metadata Services Department (DMS) and the Archives, we established that the archivists looked through “development/administrative files, as well as donor and acquisition files in the library records and haven’t found anything for an endowed fund for Anisfield/Wolf”. Another key aspect is that most of the books have been bound in the same manner with green or black covers and have been preserved in a specific way that allowed for them to look somehow identical besides the imprinted title. It is therefore fair to assume that in addition to the consistency in the dates of acquisition, the bounding indicates that the books were indeed intended to arrive at Oberlin as a collective.
Although the history of these books is shrouded with mysteries, we know that they are around 550 books in total. They have been published all throughout South West Asia and the North African region (SWANA), and unsurprisingly, the large majority of them were published in Cairo, Damascus, and Beirut, as these cities have historically been a hub for the printing and publishing of Arabic literature. Another certain aspect of these books is that they offer an extensive range of knowledge on various subjects such as linguistics, seminal texts in fiction and non-fiction, Qur'anic hermeneutics, politics and political institutions, history, and geography.
The cataloging process has been a continuous collaboration between my supervisor Sara Hasley, who is one of the Discovery & Metadata Services Assistants, and myself. I started at this job a few semesters ago when the library needed a student worker who is fluent in Arabic. Working with these books a few hours every week has been one of the most rewarding job experiences. Each book is unique in content, and carries with it an immense sense of history. Every once in a while, I will com across an ‘original’, which is a book that I cannot find by title, author, publisher, date, or any other relevant information on OCLC, the largest online public access catalog in the world, which could only mean that Oberlin is the only institution out of the 16,000 libraries that use OCLC that has the book! When this happpens, I assist Sara in the creation of a new record, which makes it possible for patrons to find and borrow materials.
The cataloging process itself has therefore revealed that most of these books are quite rare in libraries around the Anglophone world that use the OCLC system, which makes their addition to the Oberlin Colleges Libraries a great resource for Oberlin students, researchers, the wider community and libraries in the OhioLink, and Interlibrary Loan networks. Most of the books have been cataloged and are now available at the Mary Church Terrell Main Library. While these literary treasures are of key importance to our library, working with the DMS team has naturally shed light on the lack of contemporary Arabic works at Oberlin, which we hope can become one of the library’s upcoming challenges to tackle.