The Cadbury Research Library holds the University of Birmingham's special collections: more than four million manuscripts, photographs, archives and associated objects, and about 250,000 rare books, the earliest of them printed in 1471. The reading room on the Edgbaston campus is open to members of the university and to members of the public alike.
The part that concerns this atlas is one collection inside it. In 1924 Alphonse Mingana, an Assyrian scholar and priest, made the first of three buying journeys to the Middle East, funded by Edward Cadbury. What he brought back is now more than three thousand Middle Eastern manuscripts in over twenty languages, among them Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgian, Hebrew, Samaritan and Armenian.
A collection formed that way carries its own problems into a catalogue, and it is worth being direct about them. Manuscripts bought on the market in the 1920s arrive with no find context, sometimes bound together in combinations that a dealer or a previous owner made rather than a scribe, and the library inherits both the books and the errors attached to them. Part of the collection is now digitised and it is described in the FIHRIST union catalogue, which is what makes those errors findable by somebody other than the person who happens to open the volume.