Digital safeguard of laminated historical manuscripts: the treatise “Poem in Rajaz on medicine” as a case study

In this paper, we analyze and discuss the characteristics of a system for the effective digital preservation and fruition of historical manuscripts degraded by the process of lamination. As a case study, we will make reference to the “Poem in Rajaz on medicine”, written by Abubacer in the XII century, and conserved in the Al Quaraouiyine Library located in Fez, Morocco. The conceived system should have at least four main functionalities: image acquisition (i.e. digitization), image enhancement, text encoding, and linguistic analysis. Based on the evaluation of the manuscript damages, the acquisition set up should be designed in such a way to be able to avoid reflections as much as possible. Suitable digital image processing techniques should also be devised to correct the residual degradations and enhance the text for an easier legibility. Finally, semi-automatic transcription, scholarly encoding and linguistic analysis, to be performed on the virtually restored pages, should adapt existing tools to the specificity of the primary source writing system and language. The feasibility study for the realization of such a system is of general utility, in that it can provide guidelines for the digitization, the enhancement and the text encoding of the many laminated manuscripts conserved in other historical archives. On the other hand, from the cultural heritage point of view, the experimentation on the “Poem in Rajaz on medicine” could foster the systematic philological and ontological study of a unique piece of our documental heritage: the longest poem of medieval Islamic medical literature.