| The manuscripts that make up the Nouakchott collection were recorded in the AMMS in 1988/89 from the hand-list of the national repository for Arabic manuscripts at the Institut Mauritanien de Recherche Scientifique (IMRS) in Nouakchott . The IMRS began purchasing Mauritanian libraries and individual manuscripts in 1975 and by the late 1980s has acquired over 3100 items that were entered in AMMS. A separate project at IMRS focused on the preservation of poetry and is not included in this list that primarily focuses on major literary works rather than ephemera (correspondence, individual legal decisions, etc.). | The manuscripts in this collection bear comparison to two other hand-lists of Mauritanian work by Mokhtar ould Hamidoun and Adam Heymowski in 1964/5 and Ulrich Rebstock’s microfilmed selection of 2239 manuscripts (including over 600 from the IMRS collection) in 1985. |
| At the time this listing was compiled the IMRS collection was made up of manuscripts from 72 libraries, mainly from the region of Trarza in the southwest quadrant of the country and with a focus on manuscripts of local authorship. The AMMS listing includes a number of items (493) that had not been identified at that time, but the number of multiple copies in this collection point to the possibility that the contents may be broadly representative of at scholarly activity in the region adjacent to the right bank of the Senegal River. |
| The IMRS provides access to its collection by bone fide researchers who make application through the Bibliotheque Nationale in Nouakchcott. |
| Serial entries of items appear as the record number for AMMS; citations to the actual IMRS manuscript identifying numbers appear under “collection number” in the individual records. Compromises between the capability of our in-put system and Hassaniyya language usages, mainly in personal names and place names, were generally resolved in favor of an Arabized version of the Hassaniyya name. | However, the use of Latin characters did permit an insertion of a pronunciation help where Hassaniyya letters had no equivalent in Arabic. |
| The range of subject headings used in this finding aid represents an elaboration of the subject headings developed for the Boutilimit collection and has, imperfectly, been applied to other collections entered in the AMMS. It is neither comprehensive nor definitive. An effort was made to arrive at classifications that would make sense to a student of the Islamic sciences and to be consistent across English and Arabic entries, but in a few cases there may be slight variance across these fields. | Correspondence presented special problems that were solved, where the content was discernable from a title or by the annotator in the field, by grouping letters into three broad, not unambiguous rubrics: politics, economy and society. |
06/03