Checklists to the Library of Congress Microfilm Collections

In the mid-twentieth century the Library of Congress sent teams of scholars, photographers, and technicians to three regions long renowned for their rich collections of Mediaeval manuscripts in, among others, Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavonic and Syriac. These were the Greek Orthodox monasteries located on Mount Athos; the libraries of the Armenian and of the Greek Patriarchates of Jerusalem; and the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. Working with the keepers of these treasures, the teams selected and microfilmed a selection from each repository and photographed priceless illuminations from the manuscripts found in Jerusalem and Mount Sinai. Their work was capped by the publication of three checklists to these collections which have since the 1950s been heavily used by historians of religion and of the Ancient, Mediaeval, Byzantine and Islamic worlds, as well as by art historians concerned with those eras.

The guides to these microfilmed collections are being digitized under the auspices of the Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) of the Library of Congress as part of the BeCites+ Project, with the cooperation of staff from the African and Middle Eastern Division, the European Division, and the Humanities and Social Sciences Division. As each of these out-of-print guides is digitized, they will be available from this page, along with brief instructions to researchers on how to either view these materials onsite in the Microform Reading Room (for microfilms) or the Prints and Photographs Reading Room (for illuminations) or on how to order copies from the Photoduplication Service of the Library of Congress.

• A Descriptive Checklist of Selected Manuscripts in the Monasteries of Mount Athos

• Checklist of Manuscripts in St. Catherine’s Monastery Mount Sinai

• Checklist of Manuscripts in the Libraries of the Greek and Armenian Patriarchates in Jerusalem