THE POLYGLOT BIBLE meets Google digitization:

Digitizing ancient books a laborious process
Globally, hundreds of librarians turning pages for Google

Natasha Robinson, Associated Press

Monday, April 28, 2008

In a dimly lit back room on the second level of the University of Michigan library's book-shelving department, Courtney Mitchel helped a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible.

Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Inc.'s Book Search, a portal that eventually will lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.

The manual scanning - up to 600 pages a day - is much slower than Google's regular process.

"It's monotonous," said Mitchel, 24. "But it's still something that I'm learning about - how to interact with really old materials and working with digital imaging, which is relevant to art history."

The unusually tight binding on the early 16th century polyglot Bible made it hard to expose the portions toward the book's middle as Mitchel spread each pair of pages for the scanner. Librarians believe it is the oldest Bible in the world with Arabic type.

[...]

Nice project. One quibble (about the article, not the project): I'm not aware of any sixteenth century Polyglot Bibles that included Arabic. The Paris and London Polyglots, both of the seventeenth century, did though. See the Catholic Encyclopedia article on "Polyglot Bibles":

The "Complutensian Bible" published the first printed edition of the Greek Old Testament, the one which was commonly used and reproduced, before the appearance of the edition of Sixtus V, in 1587. It is followed, on the whole, in the Septuagint columns of the four great Polyglots edited by Montanus (Antwerp, 1569-72); Bertram (Heidelberg, 1586-1616); Wolder (Hamburg, 1596); and Le Jay (Paris, 1645). ...

The "Paris Polyglot" in ten volumes, more magnificent than its Antwerp predecessor, was edited with less accuracy, and it lacks a critical apparatus. Its notable additions to the texts of the "Antwerp Bible", which it reproduces without much change, are the Samaritan Pentateuch and its Samaritan version edited with Latin translation by the Oratorian, Jean Morin, the Syriac Old Testament and New Testament Antilegomena, and the Arabic version of the Old Testament.

The "London Polyglot" in six volumes, edited by Brian Walton (1654-7), improved considerably on the texts of its predecessors. Besides them, it has the Ethiopic Psalter, Canticle of Canticles, and New Testament, the Arabic New Testament, and the Gospels in Persian. All the texts not Latin are accompanied by Latin translations, and all, sometimes nine in number, are arranged side by side or one over another on the two pages open before the reader ...

UPDATE: Gilles Firmin e-mails:

Je ne sais pas dans quelle mesure un "librarian" peut distinguer entre le syriaque (présent dans la Polyglotte d'Anvers) et l'arabe... En tout état de cause, l'arabe figurait bien dans la première "polyglotte" imprimée : non pas une Bible complète, toutefois, mais dans le Psautier de Giustiniani (1516).

So there was a Polyglot Psalter of the right period which included Arabic. Perhaps this is the "polyglot Bible" to which the article is referring. Thanks for the correction.