| The manuscripts that make up the Timbuctu collection were recorded in the AMMS in 1990/91 from a photographed copy of the hand-list maintained at the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Historiques Ahmad Baba (CEDRAB), Timbuctu, made available for this project by the then director Mahmoud Zoubair. At that time 5640 manuscripts had been recorded at CEDRAB, a compilation of locally gathered materials that has since grown to over 16,000 holdings. The Al-Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation began printing a series of catalogues for CEDRAB in 1995 with rather more attention to individual manuscripts than was possible in the hand-list, and although the numeration of the first 5640 items in AMMS.3 roughly correspond to the printed volumes, there is some discrepancy and researchers will need to confirm the record numbers for the Timbuctu collection that are cited in AMMS.3 entries with the official published volumes. | These are: Vol. I (ed. Sidi Amar Ould Ely, 1995) records 1-1500; |
Correspondence between the order in which manuscripts are listed in these catalogues and the AMMS.3 numeration is not always exact. The following is a summery of the correspondence between AMMS.s entries and the published catalogues. Volume I lists entries in a numerical order and inserts the actual collection numbers in (brackets); these bracketed collection numbers correspond to the numeration of the first 1500 items in AMMS.3. In Volume II there is exact coordination between manuscript numeration and the AMMS.3 entries up to published catalogue entry 2672. Between it and # 2900 there is a discordance that is resolved by published entry # 3000 (which appears in AMMS.3 as # 3002 in the ‘Timbuctu’ collection). Volume III continues in exact coordination with the AMMS.3 entries but for a two-entry discordance noted above, and by entry #4467 both systems are again entirely synchronized. Volume IV numeration and that of the AMMS.3 entries continue to be synchronized up to entry #5561 (the point where the CAB collection concluded in 1991) and the AMMS.3 entries now conclude. |
| The Timbuctu collection was built from various individual collections in Northern Mali beginning in the late 1970s. Among the most important local libraries that were incorporated into the CEDRAB collection was that of Ahmad Bul-Araf, a Timbuktu bibliophile of Moroccan ancestry. By the early 1990s, CEDRAB had become the major Arabic manuscript repository in West Africa, recipient of UNESCO and Al-Furqan funding and with facilities for researchers and manuscript preservation that are unparalleled across the Sahel. | Its early accessions reflect the bias found in other national repositories toward classical works and major local authors, although more recent acquisitions (as reflected in the published catalogues) include a large amount of correspondence and lesser works, perhaps more reflective of the locally-produced literary record of the region. This first on-line version of AMMS.3 has not been coordinated with the additional data relative to individual entries that appear in some of the published catalogues, and it must therefore be used as a rough, and partial, guide to the CEDRAB collections. |
| The Centre Ahmad Baba collection is open to researchers in Timbuctu, Mali. Officially, researchers require authorization from the Malian government to conduct research in the country. Application for research authorization should be directed to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique (CNRST), BP: 3052, Bamako, Mali; Tel. (223) 219085; Fax: (223) 218446/216698. | The Centre Ahmad Baba can be contacted directly at the following address: Le Directeur |
| Serial entries of items appear as the record number for AMMS; citations to the actual hand-list numbers in the CEDRAB collection (as they appeared in 1990) are under “collection number” in the individual records. The numeration of the first 5640 items from the CAB that appear in AMMS.3 roughly correspond to the printed volumes cited above, but there is some discrepancy (see above) and researchers will need to confirm the record numbers for the Timbuctu collection that are cited in AMMS.3 entries with the official published volumes (I-IV). |
| The range of subject headings used in AMMS represent an effort to uniformly apply the subject headings developed for the Boutilimit and Nouakchott collections, but in some of the CEDRAB entries (working from their hand-lists rather than the better-documented, published volumes now available) the subject headings were reconstructed from titles where these were available. These subject rubrics are 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 presents special problems that were solved, where the content was discernable from a title, by grouping letters into three broad, not unambiguous rubrics: politics, economy and society. |