Morocco sits at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, of Europe and Africa: a unique constellation of traditions, religions, and languages that continues to shape music and architecture, material culture and oral traditions, age-old forms of popular piety as well as new festivals and museums. Among the most extraordinary artefacts of Morocco’s multicultural heritage are a wealth of manuscripts produced across nearly a millennium, primarily in Arabic and Hebrew script.

Public and university libraries across the world hold many thousands of manuscripts produced in what is now Morocco. This dispersal in numerous repositories has made it hard for scholars anywhere to study them together as a corpus. It has also severely limited Moroccans’ access to this this immense and precious heritage. With digitisation projects advancing rapidly but independently across the world, this Digital Library of Global Moroccan Collections aims to bring together as many of these materials as possible in one simple and accessible format designed for both academic study and public access.

Funded by a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant, the project also aims to solve a general problem in Digital Humanities by creating a prototype of a repurposable platform that could be used as a simple tool to aggregate and search across any kind of digitised content available over IIIF (the International Image Interoperability Framework), by scholars working on any kind of material, without the need for a high level of technical expertise, financial resources or institutional infrastructure.