The digitized Vööbus Syriac Manuscript Collection is designed to provide fast, basic access to a complicated collection of historical film that previously has not been available online.
The collection was created by Dr. Arthur Vööbus (1909–1988), an Estonian scholar, teacher, and minister. During his career, Vööbus made more than 40 separate trips to the Middle East, creating a collection of manuscript photographs on film that is larger than any other collection of Syriac manuscript images before the advent of digital imaging.
Metadata for the digitized collection is simple, based purely on Vööbus’s original labeling and the physical organization of the film strips. Each image is assigned to a city and, within that city, arranged by pages and image numbers. Note: the page and image numbers are NOT necessarily related to any particular manuscript; rather, the pages refer to the physical location of the film strips in binders at HMML. For more details and examples, see the background page.
The goal of this website is to provide basic access to the images now, since cataloging the individual images is beyond HMML’s current scope.