“It is unlikely that someone raised in...

“It is unlikely that someone raised in a South-Central Los Angeles housing project would have this privilege,” said Firpo W. Carr of Hawthorne.

But Carr, 35, on leave from his customer service post with IBM, departed this week for a second visit to a Leningrad library to photographically record selected pages of documents important in studies of religious texts.

The facility is the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library, where a team from USC and the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont two months ago photographed all 1,000 pages of the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. Negotiations to photograph that codex and other works in the vast collection, which have been rarely accessible to Western scholars, were begun years ago by the Claremont center.

Carr was able to get first crack at the codex in early 1989 after striking up a friendship with the library’s manuscript section director, Viktor Lebedev. The American photographed 20 pages of the document, but the purposes and procedures differ from the Claremont-USC project.

Carr is using an IBM system called Audio/Visual Connection, which holds promise for instructional and research uses.

Karie Masterson, a programmer/analyst with the UCLA Humanities Computing Facility, has been working with Carr. “We will take the videotape he gets, connect a television and VCR to a computer, then grab frames of the pages from the television and save them on hard disks,” she said. The photographed images then can be viewed on a computer screen along with transliterations and translations of the same page to aid students and scholars. Because the images are put into computerized form, they could be transmitted over phone lines to other study centers as well.

Masterson said that among the manuscripts being filmed by Carr for UCLA is a partial copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead held by the Leningrad library.

In his six days at the library, Carr will also be photographing a 1,074-year-old partial manuscript of the Hebrew Bible and filling various scholarly requests, such as recording documents on church councils for medieval specialists at Stanford University.

With studies in ancient languages and a doctorate in computer science from Pacific Western University, Carr established his ScholarTechnological Institute of Research in Hawthorne in hopes of introducing both scholars and lay people to techniques in the field.

PEOPLE

The Rev. Robert B. Watson, a United Methodist pastor in Montrose who as a 7-year-old played “Pee Wee” in the 1938 movie “Boys Town,” recently gave the sermon at the dedication of the $3-million Chambers Protestant Chapel at Boys Town, Neb.

The sometimes audacious preacher of prosperity, the Rev. Ike, minister of New York City’s 5,000-seat United Church since the 1960s, will speak on that theme at the 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. services Sunday at the Church of Religious Science in Redondo Beach.

DATES

A ceremony marking the 45th anniversary of the World War II atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is planned for 2 p.m. Sunday at the Los Angeles Baha’i Center, 5755 Rodeo Road. The peace program, to be emceed by actor Edward James Olmos, will include Mayor Tom Bradley and 1985 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Rudolph Waiton, co-founder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

Bishop Nicholas D’Antonio, auxiliary bishop of the New Orleans Catholic Archdiocese, will be one of the featured speakers next weekend in Irvine at a two-day seminar designed to publicize the reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary to six young people in Yugoslavia since 1981. The Medjugorje Peace Conference will begin at 8 a.m. Saturday at the Bren Events Center on the UC Irvine campus.