About the archive
A reading room for
al-Andalus
الأرشيف الأندلسي الرقمي
The Andalusian Digital Archive gathers the written heritage of al-Andalus and the Maghrib — works of medicine, agronomy, geography, law and letters — and presents them, page by page, as they survive in the world's libraries. Each manuscript is shown at full resolution in a deep-zoom reading viewer, with a line-by-line transcription laid over the page wherever the text has been recovered.
How to read
Browse by collection, then open any manuscript in the viewer. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom into the grain of the paper and the ductus of the hand. Where a transcription exists, toggle the text layer to read the recovered words in place; the text is selectable and aligned to the lines it transcribes.
۞ Every manuscript also carries a standard IIIF manifest — drag its link into any compatible viewer to study it alongside works held elsewhere.
The transcription
Transcriptions are produced by machine — handwritten-text recognition for the manuscript hands, optical character recognition for printed matter — and are presented as a research aid, not a critical edition. They are imperfect by nature and improve as the archive grows; a folio gains a text layer once it has been processed.
Sources & rights
The 222,812 folios in this archive are reproduced from the digital collections of their holding institutions, to whom all credit is due:
- Various holding institutions — Andalusian Quran Collection
- Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial (Patrimonio Nacional) — El Escorial Collection
- Qatar National Library / Qatar Digital Library — QNL Andalusian Collection
- Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana — Vatican Collection
- Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford — Bodleian Collection
Each manuscript is presented under the terms of its holding institution; those terms are carried in its IIIF manifest. This archive claims no rights over the works themselves.
The standard
Everything here speaks IIIF — the International Image Interoperability Framework. Images are served through a IIIF Image API for tiled deep zoom; manuscripts are described as IIIF Presentation 3.0 manifests; transcriptions travel as IIIF annotations. The viewer is Mirador, the reference IIIF reading environment.