Dr. Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, Curator Emerita, Department of Islamic Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, donated her teaching and research collection of several thousand 35mm slides to the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT in December 2016. The archive comprises slides, photo prints, and negatives covering objects and architectural sites from cities across the Near East, North Africa, alongside works from premier European and American art collections. Photographed objects focus on the areas of Jenkins-Madina's research, including ceramics, metalwork, and other plastic arts. Some photographed collections are of particular significance (such as Jenkins-Madina's own collection), since those objects have moved to other institutions in recent decades. Some photos also derive from archaeological digs and fellowships which Jenkins-Madina undertook during the course of her career. Most images in the collection date from roughly the 1980s to the early 2000s.

This online collection contains a selection of 400 scanned images from the archive documenting historic architecture in Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Tunisia. A finding aid describing the entire archive is available at MIT's online platform for distinctive collections, ArchivesSpace. Requests for materials from this archive can be made using the Distinctive Collections Request System. For questions regarding the archive, please contact the Aga Khan Documentation Center at akdc@mit.edu.