The library shelves what homes don't

Claim (verbatim)

The library shelves what homes don't. This connects the one substantially surviving medieval Arabic institutional library catalogue with household book culture. An endowed library and a scholar's home solved different problems: the home held the curriculum, the matns, the working copies a man taught from and annotated; the endowment held what no individual could afford or justify owning, the multi-volume reference sets, the prestige compilations, the consultation literature. If so, the institutional and domestic strata of the book world were complementary rather than duplicative, and their title lists should be nearly disjoint even within one city and century.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

The Jaccard title-overlap between the 13th-century Ashrafiya library catalogue in Damascus (over two thousand entries) and published private book lists and estate inventories from Syria and Egypt of the 12th-15th centuries is at most 0.15. Primary clause: the Jaccard bound of 0.15; the verdict follows it. Secondary: multi-volume works are over-represented in the Ashrafiya relative to the private lists by at least a factor of 2.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the published edition of the Ashrafiya catalogue (Hirschler, Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library, Edinburgh 2016) against published medieval private and estate book lists from Damascus and Cairo.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

The one substantially surviving medieval Arabic institutional catalogue -- the Ashrafiya (670s/1270s, 2,000+ entries) -- is edited and analysed by Hirschler, who reads its composition against contemporaneous library culture, so the institutional/domestic complementarity the item stakes is the kind of question the source was published to open. Not located: the item's specific measurement -- a Jaccard title-overlap of <=0.15 between the Ashrafiya catalogue and published private/estate book lists from 12th-15th-century Syria and Egypt, with multi-volume works over-represented in the institution by >=2x. The near-disjointness thesis is plausible and the data exist; the executed overlap statistic is unrun.

• Konrad Hirschler, Medieval Damascus: Plurality and Diversity in an Arabic Library -- The Ashrafiya Library Catalogue (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) — The edited Ashrafiya catalogue, set against wider book-ownership culture
• Published medieval private and estate book lists from Damascus and Cairo — The kill dataset for the institutional-vs-domestic Jaccard overlap

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.