We recently tweeted out some of our favorite blogs to follow: we threw out a couple of names you probably know and some you might not have had the chance to follow. Then our followers (and some of the people we tagged) tweeted back at us some of their favorites (particular shout-outs to Rich Heffron, Hind Makki and M Lynx Qualey). Here it is, in list form, if you don’t follow us on Twitter. Please either comment bellow on your favorites, tweet at us, or email us at hazineblog@gmail.com and we’ll update the list as we go along!
Author: Nadia Barclay, Director of Outreach at the Arab Cultural Trust
Overview:
al-hakawati.net is a virtual public library of Arab and Islamic heritage. Our purpose is to make learning and knowledge about the Arab world easily available, and to promote understanding of Arab/Islamic culture in the Arabic speaking work and in the West.
Over the past 12 years we have built an extensive collection, including:
Nearly 400 full-text searchableheritage books on astronomy, history, mathematics, poetry, medicine, geography, religion, music etc.
The library is organized into ten main sections: Stories & Tales, Personalities, States, Cities and Regions, Civilizations, Arts and Artists, Histories and Cultures, Environment, Architecture, and Religion.
Tips to Navigate the Library:
Our readers can find content using the freeform search toolbar or the drop down menus. Each of the 10 main sections in the menu has several sub-sections.
We recently redesigned the homepage incorporating 9 frames where we highlight articles from the various sections as suggestions of what a reader can expect. This design also allows us to feature selections (paragraphs or chapters) from the canon of Arabic books, and thereby introduce a new generation to this valuable resource.
The library is mostly in Arabic; however, there is anEnglish section, currently being updated. It covers the same 10 main topics, but the content was produced separately, and is not a translation of the Arabic texts.
To contact us with feedback or questions, please send an email to me, Nadia Barclay at: nadia.barclay@gmail.com
Last week HAZİNE posted a list of libraries with open-access digitized manuscripts. This week we would like to present a list of institutions and websites with freely accessible archival material. As with the manuscript list, we will continue to add and modify this page.
Screenshot of Genizah document at Cambridge University Digital Library.
Asnad.org at Philips-Üniversität Marburg has collated and presented in digital format more than 1,000 Persian documents related to the history of Persian lands between the ninth and nineteenth centuries. Most of these documents are reproductions of documents published in academic publications. In addition to the images of the documents, the site offers full bibliographic information on the document’s location and previous citation in scholarly volumes.
Cambridge University’s Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection, along with the Mosseri Genizah Collection are available through the university’s library website. The Cairo Genizah, in addition to preserving a vast collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts, contains thousands of documents relevant to the social and economic history of the Mediterranean and the Middle East from the tenth to thirteenth century. In addition to the large archive digitized at Cambridge, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the John Rylands Library in Manchester, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America also have significant portions of the Cairo Genizah.
The General State Archives has an extensive online catalog with a number of documents digitized and freely available for viewing. The archive contains a number of Ottoman era court registers and cadastral surveys in addition to all of the archival material accumulated since the foundation of the Kingdom of Greece.
There are a number of collections at the National Archives which are digitized and available for download. Several of these collections may be of interest to scholars of the Middle East, especially the correspondence of the Arab Bureau between 1911 and 1920 (FO 882).
Through Access Archival Databases, the National Archives has made available online transcriptions of a number of collections, some of which will be of interest to historians of post-1945 Middle East. For instance, see the Central Foreign Policy Files which include State Department electronic telegrams between 1 January 1973 and 31 December 1976.
The Venetian archives have made freely available online one of its most important collections of Ottoman documents, Miscellanea documenti turchi. For background on this collection, as well as details on how to navigate the archive’s site, see HAZİNE’s review.
Acquiring copies of manuscripts is quite expensive but luckily more and more libraries are making available parts, or even all, of their collections to researchers online. Here’s an initial list of sites you can visit to access, and sometimes even download, manuscripts for free. We’ll update this as we find more collections online.
One of the many manuscripts available online on the Bnf site.
