Library Collection Projects

     The objective of the Library Collection Projects is to enable an undergraduate and a faculty member to work together with a librarian on a collection recently given to the University Library and which has not yet been catalogued and explored. One example of a library collection project focused on the Mahdi Arabic Collection, enabled two undergraduates familiar with Arabic to work in the collection under the guidance of a University librarian and a Professor of Comparative Literature. The students learned relevant bibliographic tools in Middle East Studies, including abstracts, indexes, encyclopedias, atlases, dictionaries, news summaries and digests, and US and UN documentation; they traveled to other libraries to consult with librarians and use bibliographic sources unobtainable at Brown; and they completed a pilot project on the "Arabian Nights Collection" for use in a course the following year. In the words of their faculty sponsor, the students involved in this project became "superb researchers and scholars in the field of Arabic bibliography."