The collection of Oriental manuscripts in the University Library Freiburg consists of 199 manuscripts from the collection of the Ancient Near Eastern studies scholar Helmut Theodor Bossert and further Oriental manuscripts of various provenances. Additionally, it includes microfilms of around 2,500 manuscripts from Mauretania, all of which are presented in the database OMAR.
All manuscripts are catalogued in Qalamos, the database for metadata and digital copies of Oriental manuscripts in Germany.
The Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg owes the collection of 199 Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts to a donation from Ancient Near Eastern studies scholar Helmut Theodor Bossert (1889-1961). In 1958, Bossert retired in Freiburg from his longstanding professorship in Istanbul. When he was appointed honorary professor, he gifted his collection of manuscripts, which he had acquired in Turkey, to the Oriental Seminar of the university. In 2017 the manuscripts passed into the property of the University Library.
The collection was catalogued by Renate Würsch and Gudrun Schubert in a handlist which was published online in 2005 which can also be found in the Katalog plus.
This concerns a small accumulation of miscellaneous Arabic, Ottoman, Hebrew, and Coptic manuscripts of multiple origins, as well as one palm leaf manuscript. Some of the items come from the estate of Old Testament scholar and Orientalist Johann Leonhard Hug (1765-1846), to whom the University Library Freiburg owes many Western manuscripts.
OMAR (Oriental MAnuscript Resource) comprises microfilms of approximately 2,500 Arabic and Ḥassānīya manuscripts, recorded between 1978 and 1997 by Ulrich Rebstock, Rainer Oßwald and Tobias Mayer in over 300 different private and public libraries in Mauritania in cooperation with the Institut Mauritanien dse Recherche Scientifique (IMRS, Nouakchott).
Thanks to the digitization of the microfilms, the roughly 134,000 pages of the manuscripts are accessible through the database OMAR where they are linked with bibliographic metadata.
