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Google Ngram: an intro for historians

paludisme et ses amis

Written by Chris Gratien and Daniel Pontillo 

Digitization is changing historical research, and few digitization projects have done more to revolutionize the way we write history than Google Books. This project, in partnership with a number of libraries, has rendered once rare and difficult-to-access printed books increasingly ubiquitous commodities available for download through Google and partner sites such as Hathitrust. This has multiplied the value of rare books that once slumbered in the obscurity of research libraries. Now they can be searched and consulted with unprecedented speed and used to form corpora of historical, cultural, and linguistic material. The change is not simply about accessing more data; it is about new ways of organizing and interpreting that data afforded by its new digital form. The Google Books Ngram Viewer is one important example of how digitization can transform the types of research questions asked and answered in the social sciences and the humanities. It features a simple web interface to Google’s rich database of scanned texts from centuries of publishing in English, as well as other languages, such as French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, and Chinese.

For researchers enticed by this description but unsure what an n-gram is or how to use it, we offer this brief introduction. An n-gram is simply an instance of a word or phrase within a corpus, where n is a variable representing the number of words. Google’s service allows researchers to track the relative frequency of n-grams over time and generates plots (called T-transformations) to illustrate and contrast the usage of words and phrases over years. While the causal link between language use and the statistical patterns found in published materials is not necessarily linear, Ngram can offer a window into shifts in human language and society by substantiating putative trends formerly described only qualitatively and offering new questions and potential areas of inquiry, particularly when interpreted within an informed historical context.

Ngram has yet to make a big splash among academic historians, who are perhaps less accustomed to using and evaluating statistical data than linguists. However, given that Ngram draws on the very sources used by historians and has the power to represent information about them in a diachronic manner, we believe that it has much to offer researchers. Moreover, the visualization of this data presents in supremely legible form a representation of important historical points that make Ngram ideal for classroom and conference presentations.

Yet, at the same time, just as digitization has created the potential for “cherry-picking” data from searchable texts without proper care for context, Google Ngram has the power to mislead scholars that ask the wrong questions. In order to elaborate further on the benefits and hazards of the Google Ngram viewers, we will start with a basic “historian’s example” of how Ngram can be used and follow with an example from linguistics that demonstrates how to make the most of Ngram searches.

A Historian’s Example

When writing the history of disease, it is relatively easy to formulate a narrative based on dates marking certain influential medical discoveries. For example, in the case of malaria, we know that Charles Laveran identified the parasite that causes malaria in 1880 and Ronald Ross first identified the parasite within the mosquito in 1897, which subsequently led to the discovery that mosquitos transmit malaria between humans. Yet, this tells us little about how understandings of disease changed over time, and how former notions regarding disease persisted alongside new ones.

One of the challenging questions faced by disease historians is thus how to represent changing understandings of disease quantitatively rather than with anecdotal evidence. Google Ngram offers one possible avenue. Malaria is a relatively new term in the English language that nonetheless predates the aforementioned discoveries. Its etymology is rooted in medeival Italian mal aria (bad air) and refers to the idea that the disease was caused by dirty emanations from swamps and rotting organic matter. However, the term malaria became the standard way of referring to the disease only after the discovery of the parasite. Before this, there were various ways of referring to the unique symptoms of recurring fever and chills associated with malaria.

When did people stop getting ague?

The above n-gram diachronically charts the relative prevalence of two words roughly referring to the same illness in the English language. The first, ague (a-gyu), is now an exceedingly rare term that few English speakers would recognize today. Variations of this word were once common in a number of European languages. It comes from the Latin term for “acute fevers (febris acuta)”, the most glaring symptom of malaria. The second, is the word malaria universally applied today in reference to that illness in English. The graph shows the respective fates of the two terms over the centuries. The term malaria began to spread during the early nineteenth century and rose in importance, we presume, due in part to medical research and writings on its causes and effects. The two terms were of nearly identical importance in 1880 when Laveran first discovered the parasite. Following this discovery, we see a rise in the occurrences of malaria in written English (Laveran in fact used paludisme which became “paludism” in English). Use of the word malaria peaked around the World War II era, when malaria was a major killer among Allied military personnel in the Pacific theater and research into the use of DDT in combating the illness was at its height. Meanwhile, ague continued to wane as the cause and symptom of malaria were merged. However, its use lingered in the intervening decades, representing the remnants of past understandings of disease. This n-gram shows a similar trend in the medical vocabulary of the French language, indicating an epilinguistic phenomenon regarding understandings of disease.

Paludisme et ses amis

In the above case, we have used n-gram to represent graphically a trend that was already vaguely understood but hard to visualize in a quantitative manner. The n-gram does not necessarily make the discovery on its own, but it certainly helps us to strengthen our claims. We can also use Google Ngram Viewer to stimulate new questions. For example, we might ask how the rise of medical science has led to a shift whereby diseases are increasingly identified according to their cause rather than their symptoms by making similar queries for other well-known diseases. Yet, here we must note that Google Ngram raises more question than it answers. To illustrate the benefits, limitations, and hazards of Google Ngram further, we will delve into the contentious and vogue issues of identity, labeling, and political correctness.

English
English
French
French

Upon seeing the types of data that Google Ngram Viewer can visualize, many historians will probably begin by searching for new or old words related to their topics of study, for example, juxtaposing “Native American” with “American Indian” or putting “Moslem” and “Muslim” side by side. Such searches can result in some surprising indications that encourage further inquiry. The two plots above show the use of the word “savage” and “barbarous” diachronically, with English being on the left and the French translations “sauvage” and “barbare” on the right. While these pairs are good translations for each other, we must acknowledge that they may not be used in identical ways in both languages. They also serve as multiple parts of speech, but Google can account for that (see below). It is also important to note that comparing results from different corpora is statistically problematic because the overall size, the relative quantities of certain document types and distribution of topics in the source materials may differ dramatically. Any statistical biases that result from such differences in the distribution of sources can skew the results. Due to the very massive size of these corpora, the results should nevertheless give us a rough illustration of an underlying trend. In this case, the plot suggests that the word “savage,” which was more commonly mentioned in English than “sauvage” in French ca. 1800, has steadily declined in usage, particularly after 1900. Given the politically incorrect connotations due to its association with various forms of racism and cultural superiority as well as colonialism, this seems intuitive to us. Yet, what is then harder to explain is the parabolic rise and fall of “sauvage” in French, which apparently enjoyed an uptick at the end of the 1950s, precisely as colonialism was on the wane.

These graphs may inspire us to ask further questions; however, they may also be used to illustrate the perils of using n-grams to speculate about sociolinguistic phenomena. For example, if we try to interpret this data in terms of its extra-linguistic meaning, we might say as is commonly and anecdotally observed that the French language has not been impacted by a movement towards political correctness in the same way that English has. While a discussion of these graphs in terms of those questions may make fun and interesting table conversation at Franco-American get-togethers in New York and Paris alike, this is an example of reading something into Google’s data that it simply is not equipped to tell us (just search for even less politically correct words in Ngram and you’ll see data that further proves our point). The message to historians seeking to utilize n-grams is simply that as in all studies of history, unsystematic evaluation of evidence and lack of consideration of contexts will lead to mistakes. The comparative study of political correctness would certainly be a fascinating one, but Google Ngram will not be able to do all the work. Yes, you will still have to read books. Fortunately, Google has digitized many of them!

All of this being said, it is also helpful to remember that Google Ngram utilizes a linguistic corpus organized according to the standards of modern computational linguistics, which is to say that for historians to maximize the utility of n-grams, they will benefit from acquaintance with the ways in which linguists put them to use. Learning what the data represents and how it is intended to be used will both enable researchers to ask more precise question and extract more meaning from their searches.

A Linguist’s Example

Just as digitization tremendously impacts historiography, the horizon of linguistics research has shifted considerably due to the massive increase in availability of language use data in the past several decades. This rise in availability has been accompanied by advances in quantitative methods that permit the statistical patterns in records of human language to be investigated with unprecedented empirical rigor. Linguists now use corpus data to explore questions about language use ranging from raw lexical or phrasal occurrence frequency to patterns in syntax, word meaning, pragmatic interpretations and discourse structure.

These tools are of course not without limitations. Large pools of linguistic data are difficult to organize, and the types of testable hypotheses are tightly constrained by the level of annotation that accompanies the raw data. In this context, annotation can be as simple as tagging each string with its part-of-speech (POS)—a technique known as automatic probabilistic tagging, or it can be as complex as encoding texts into abstract tokens and embedding them in formal representations of discourse structure. As an example, The Penn Tree Bank, the first widely used annotated corpus, offers basic syntactic and semantic information about its constituent sentences. There are also newer specialized corpora such as The Proposition Bank, which is annotated with the semantic role of verbs, allowing for the automated distinction of agent/patient status that would otherwise be conflated by POS alone.

Part of what makes the Google Ngram Viewer so useful for linguists is the same benefit offered to historians, which is that unlike most of the annotated corpora currently available, it offers the option for exploring diachronic questions. The organization of language use data by year opens a category of inquiry about language change that was previously much more speculative. Before Google Ngrams, there were a handful of comparatively small and temporally limited corpora such as the The Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It should be noted that Google’s corpus, while much larger than these, lacks their breadth of unique tokens due to its hard lower threshold on occurrence; it only includes results that occur at least forty times. This leaves precise questions about the origins of novel words or phrases unanswerable, and it prohibits any type of inquiry about rare constructions or very low-frequency words. Nonetheless, the sheer volume and temporal range of the corpus offers unique advantages for certain types of research.

As discussed above, historians might find Ngram useful for exploring the history of certain concepts or identifying historical fluctuations in the importance of topics, but what types of questions would a linguist ask? One typical question about language use that might be asked with Google n-grams regards the historical shift in English complementizer drop patterns. The examples below illustrate how the complementizer “that” may be dropped in many English constructions.

1. Chris knew (that) he would relent on his promise.

2. Kellen thought (that) they wouldn’t mind watching him eat his dinner.

Exploring this issue will require more specialized searches than those conducted above. Fortunately, Google Ngram Viewer allows us to look at the relative frequency of these two possible constructions across nearly two centuries of language use data. The plot below shows the result of this comparison for a particular verb (suggest) that may take a complementizer phrase as an argument.

That Deletion

This change and crossover between the two plots shows us that the typical syntactic pattern for this particular verb underwent a significant historical shift. Collecting trends of this type across different classes of verbs might offer some insight into the pressures underlying this change more generally. This type of shift may for example correlate with known historical events or the rise and fall of publications aimed at certain social registers.

The value of this tool for linguistics researchers is evident, but we would like to stress that making use of basic syntactic information included in Google Ngram’s corpus can benefit social scientists as well. Certain questions couched in language change may offer intriguing insight into changes in cultural trends and standards. The plot below effectively contrasts the proportion of all instances of the pronoun “he” that were followed by the word “works” to the proportion of all instances of the pronoun “she” that were followed by the word “works”. Google Ngram’s division operator allows us to compute these ratios very easily. This measure roughly represents how often, when discussing either a female or male subject, the subject was described as working. Using this more complex n-gram query, we can ask about the relative change in discussion of female work while ignoring the well-known baseline bias for male subjects in published work. We can read the rise in frequency of the feminine phrase as a rise in published discussion of female behaviors as “work” and hence a sort of rough proxy for the increase in socio-cultural normativity of female employment at least within the domains of constituent texts. It is also interesting to note the visible trough in frequency for both bigrams that chronologically coincides with the Great Depression.

work

While Google n-grams may lack the type of granularity necessary for detailed network-level analysis and fine-grained modeling of language change—and one must resist the temptation of presuming strong causal links where there is only correlation, these examples illustrate the breadth of inquiry that is possible. The sheer size and availability of this tool make it a potentially indispensable resource for research in any field where the use of language might reflect broader aspects of human behavior, such as in psychology, linguistics, history, or anthropology.

The Need for Digitization

In many ways, Google Ngram Viewer further substantiates what has increasingly been argued within the social sciences and humanities since the linguistic turn. Conceptual categories are not stable, and n-grams not only support this claim but also offer ways of studying even the most subtle changes in word use and conceptual nuance through mark-ups that allow researchers to control for the frequency of words in different parts of speech. Yet, it also reveals some disconcerting realities among various fields of study from anthropology to linguistics that have long railed against the reification of Eurocentrism and the universality of the “Western experience.” The Google Books corpus is formed out of the holdings of American libraries and limited by the constraints of current OCR technology (which is for the most part only widely available for European languages). Historians of the Ottoman Empire will find this tool considerably less useful than those who study US or Mexican history, and those who want to make comparative studies will be forced to remain within this Western context.

However, if we assume that the Google Ngram Viewer is not the first and last of its kind, this tool portends an exciting future of corpus-based analysis. As OCR technologies improve to encompass handwritten texts to counteract the biases of a solely print-based representation of linguistic change, the conclusions we can make will grow stronger. This development further emphasizes the utility of digitization projects, and we wish to stress that in regions of the world such as the Middle East where market forces may not push the development of sophisticated OCR, public or private funding for digitization and the expansion of text-recognition will be critical to securing the place of important historical languages such as Arabic or Ottoman Turkish within the growing corpus of human linguistic data.

__________________________________________________________________________

Chris Gratien is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Georgetown University researching the history of disease and ecology in the Ottoman Empire.

Daniel Pontillo is a doctoral student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at University of Rochester.

11 January 2014

Cite this: Chris Gratien and Daniel Pontillo, “Google Ngram: an Introduction for Historians,” HAZİNE, 11 January 2014, https://hazine.info/2014/01/11/google-ngram-for-historians/ ‎

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Gazi Husrev Begova Library

Written by Nir Shafir

Gazi Husrev-Begova Biblioteka (hereafter GHB) is the largest collection of Islamic manuscripts and documents in the Balkans. Located on the premises of the mosque complex of the same name in Sarajevo, the well-catalogued collection and brand new library is one of the premier locations for the study of the Ottoman Empire in general and the Balkans in particular. At the beginning of 2014, the library will officially open a state-of-the-art building to researchers and the general public.

The entrance to Gazi Husrev Begova Library
The entrance to Gazi Husrev Begova Library

History

Like many manuscript libraries in the Islamic world, the collections of Gazi Husrev Beg Library coalesced as it aggregated the manuscripts and papers of various medresas, Sufi lodges, and private libraries over the years. The complex that houses the library was constructed by that great sixteenth-century benefactor of Sarajevo—the eponymous Gazi Husrev Beg. Starting with a medresa, dzami, hanikah, and a market, it grew to include various tombs and a clock tower displaying lunar time. In 1697, however, Eugene of Savoy razed Sarajevo, supposedly destroying many of the books and ledgers in the process. While the medresa was endowed with a small group of books, a separate library building was only built for the medresa in 1863. (Two other library buildings in Sarajevo predate this library though they are no longer extant.) In the twentieth century, the library began to incorporate the collections of other institutions and private individuals. The first volume of the catalog was published in 1963 and followed by subsequent volumes of equal detail over the years. During the 1991-1994 war, the manuscripts and defters were hidden away in private homes and bank vaults and so they were spared the fate of the Oriental Institute collections, which were completely destroyed in a fire started by the shelling of Serbian artillery. In January 2014, a new, ultra-modern library building, built with the generous donations of the Qatari royal family, will be opened. The al-Furqan Foundation has also supported the continued publication of the high quality catalog. The library has recently completely digitized its collections, which continue to grow today through the donations and bequests of individuals.

Collection

The library’s main collections consist of Islamic manuscripts, printed books, documents such as court records, and photographs. The manuscript collection contains around 10,500 volumes in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Bosnian (in Arabic script). Of these languages, the first two tend to predominate. Given that many of the books in Sarajevo apparently did not survive its razing in 1697, the manuscript collection is heavily weighted toward topics, authors, and copies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The collection seems to include a much higher than average concentration of moralistic, dogmatic, and sermon-like texts than other manuscript collections and so researchers can find a wide array of texts condemning practices like tomb visitation or tobacco smoking. Similarly, there is a large number of manuscripts copied by medresa students, as evinced by the surfeit of treatises on education. While such treatises were popular throughout the Ottoman Empire, the local origins of many of these copies provide researchers a glimpse of the local intellectual

Eugene, the dude that burned down Sarajevo in 1697
Eugene, the dude that burned down Sarajevo in 1697

culture. Researchers can gain further insight into this local culture by reading the small but significant number of treatises written in Bosnian, the vernacular of the region. These treatises, too, are often prayer books or moralistic exhortations. At the same time, the collection points to the many Bosnian scholars who traveled to Syria, the Hijaz and Istanbul in the early modern period. There are, of course, a good number of older and more “precious” books and the library’s promotional brochure highlights some of these.

In addition to its manuscripts, the library contains one of the largest collections of early print in the Balkans. The library’s holdings comprise over 25,000 printed treatises in Arabic, Turkish and Bosnian (in Arabic scripts). In addition, it also has a collection of around 35,000 books in Bosnian and other European languages in Latin script.

The library also houses various documents from the Ottoman period. Of these, the most comprehensive are the court records (sijillat) of Sarajevo and the more limited collections for the neighboring cities of Mostar, Tuzla, and Fojnica. For Sarajevo, these records exist primarily for the eighteenth century, starting from 1707 and ending in 1852. Records from before that period are presumed to have been destroyed in the razing of the city in 1697. Three volumes of sixteenth-century court records do exist, however, for the years 1551-1552, 1556-1558, and 1565-1566. For Mostar there are two registers covering 1766-1769, for Fojnica a single register covers the years 1763-1769, and a partial register from Tuzla exists from the first half of the seventeenth century. In addition to this, there are 1,600 endowment charters (vakifnama), 500 as individual documents and 1,100 within the court record defters. Paired with these, there are around 5,000 documents produced by the Ottoman bureaucracy. Library patrons consult these documents as digital copies.

Finally, the library houses a special collection documenting the Muslim community of Bosnia. The community’s archives cover the period of 1882-1993 and complement the large collection of 5000 photographs, postcards, and posters held in the library. The library also holds complete collections of many nineteenth-century Muslim newspapers from Sarajevo.

One of the many photographs from the library's collections
One of the many photographs from the library’s collections

Research Experience

The manuscript collection of Gazi Husrev-Begova Library, along with those of the other manuscript libraries in Sarajevo, bears the distinction of being extremely well-cataloged. The eighteen-volume printed catalog, written by numerous individuals, is essentially divided into two: the first nine volumes or so describe collections present in the library until around 1970 and the second half details acquisitions after that date. In both halves, works are categorized topically. The catalogers made a smart choice to maintain the conceptual unity of each codex: all the treatises in a mecmua, which comprise the vast majority of volumes, are listed after the first entry. Codices are placed under specific topics according to their first work, which means that the topical organization of the catalog is slightly loose. Researchers should browse through indices of every volume of the catalog if they are looking for particular authors or titles. The catalogers were particularly attentive to the details of manuscript production; they mention copyist names, owners, locations, physical characteristics, as well as any unique aspects or contents of a manuscript in each entry. Excellent indices exist for author name (in Arabic and Latin scripts), title, copyist, owner(s), and location. Mistakes, while present, are rare. The catalog is written in Bosnian, but there should also be an English translation available. The catalog often quotes material directly in Arabic, so researchers can simply read the quoted text. There had been an electronic catalog available, although the library removed it recently from its website due to poor performance. In its place, the library is actively developing a new electronic catalog that it hopes to roll out in the coming months.

The printed works in the library have traditionally received less attention than the manuscripts although this is quickly changing. The library has recently finished cataloging them and once the new electronic catalog is online, researchers should be able to access the catalog of printed works. Some of these printed treatises were even part of the collections of the Ottoman-era libraries from the eighteenth century, though the new catalog might not list the original collection name for each entry, and therefore researchers must go through the volumes individually to find this information.

The main reading room of Gazi Husrev Begova Library
The main reading room of Gazi Husrev Begova Library

It is very pleasant to conduct research at Gazi Husrev-Begova Library, especially since the opening of the new building. The building has a large general reading room with excellent desks and ample windows overlooking the medresa complex. The desks have good overhead lamps. The reading room should eventually have a large collection of reference material but is empty for now.

To request a manuscript researchers should first browse through the printed eighteen-volume catalog of the library. A Bosnian- and English-language copy of the catalog is kept behind the reception desk and the staff will let you browse a couple of volumes at a time. Once the library introduces the new computer catalog, researchers should also be able to use the single computer terminal at the reception desk to find relevant manuscripts. You must stand to use this computer since it was not set up for consultations longer than a few minutes. Once researchers identify a manuscript they wish to consult, they can fill out a form and request up to twenty manuscripts at a time. After twenty minutes to an hour, the digitized copies of the manuscripts are transferred to a computer terminal in a second reading room behind the reception desk for consultation. If library patrons wish to buy copies of the digitized manuscripts, they must fill out a further form that is then sent to the director for approval. The staff might let you simply delete unwanted files on your terminal and burn the remaining images onto a CD or they might prepare the specific pages you request. Researchers can request to see the physical copy of the manuscript only after receiving permission directly from the director of the library.

The reception desk at GHB
The reception desk at GHB

The new GHB library was largely designed with digital research in mind. The quality of the digitized manuscripts is generally high, though there are the occasional low-resolution images. Generally speaking, the binding of a manuscript is photographed though this might be limited to the cover itself. Conveniently, an information slip from the catalog listing its title and author precedes the digital copy of each work, even separate treatises in a mecmua. The only inconvenience is that researchers cannot access the digitized manuscripts directly from the computer catalog.

The staff of the library are extremely helpful and professional. The working language of the library is Bosnian, though employees at the reception desk should be able to speak English, Turkish, or Arabic.

Researchers should note that as the library settles into the new building, new protocols and procedures will be instituted, so some of this information might change in the near future.  For instance, there is a large reference library of books in Bosnian, English, Arabic, Turkish, and more available to researchers, but it is not currently on the shelves. The library, however, is constantly striving to improve researcher experience and will make changes as needed.

Access

The library is open Monday to Friday, from 8:00 to 15:00. It is closed on the weekends along with secular and religious holidays. Researchers are advised to talk to the receptionist to keep abreast of religious holidays in Bosnia, which can be a bit different from those in other Muslim countries.

The library, like all research institutions in Sarajevo, is very welcoming to researchers. After a short registration process, in which researchers might need to provide a formal ID, researchers can access the collection.

The main entrance of the library might not be wheelchair accessible, but researchers in wheelchairs should be able to enter from the employee entrance on Mula Mustafe Bašeskije Street.

Reproductions

Digital reproductions are provided in the form of a CD. The price is a somewhat costly at €1 per exposure and the CD will be ready for pick-up three days after the initial request. The delay is a bit odd, since all the material is already digitized, but researchers in a hurry might be able to expedite the process with the help of an accommodating staff member. In the future, the library hopes to introduce a system that will allow researchers to request digital reproductions remotely. Researchers are not allowed to take their own photographs as they are not allowed to see the original manuscript or defter.

Transportation and Food

The library is located in the center of the old city of Sarajevo and is easily accessible by the tram. Researchers can alight at either the cathedral or the last stop— Baščaršija. The very modern looking library building is located in between the two stops, next to the Gazi Husrev Begova Dzamija complex and the  Old Synagogue/Jewish Museum. If researchers stay at hotels or hostels near the historic center, the library is easily reached by foot.

There is no shortage of eating options near the library as it is in the center of the historic city. Next door there are a variety of cafes and burek sellers as well as quite a few more touristy restaurants. There is also a small café in the library itself that serves Turkish tea, Bosnian coffee, and espresso.

Miscellaneous

The library also houses a museum in the basement that exhibits certain rare manuscripts and various material artifacts related to writing, reading, and daily life in Sarajevo. Various marble inscriptions from Sarajevo dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are also displayed in the basement for the time being. There are also conference facilities in the library itself.

The library's museum
The library’s museum

Since 1972, the library has also published a journal titled Anali Gazi Husrev-begove biblioteke, of which free copies are available online. The informative journal highlights the historical research of scholars from the area. Although the journal is written in Bosnian, researchers can render the text searchable and then copy the text into Google Translate for a relatively functional translation.

Future Plans and Rumors

The library will officially open to researchers on January 15, 2014. Some of the protocol listed above will inevitably change as the library streamlines and refines its procedures. As stated earlier, the library hopes to reintroduce a new computer catalog on its website and even provide researchers the chance to request copies remotely.

Contact information

Gaza Husrefbeg no. 46  Sarajevo 71000 Bosnia and Herzegovina

info@ghb.ba

Phone: +387 33238152, +387 33 264 960

Fax: +387 33205525

Resources and Links

Gazi Husrev Begova Biblioteka main site

Annals of Gazi Husrev Begova Library

23 December 2013

Nir Shafir is a doctoral candidate at UCLA researching the intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Cite this: Nir Shafir, “Gazi Husrev Begova Library,” HAZINE, 23 Dec 2013,  https://hazine.info/2013/12/23/ghb_library/

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Oriental Collections at Leiden University

Written by Aslıhan Gürbüzel

The rich Oriental collections of the Leiden University contain some 6,000 Middle Eastern manuscripts, about 120,000 rare books printed before 1950, and photographs of interest to the scholars of the region. The collection is located at the Special Collections section of the main library of the university at Leiden, the Netherlands.

This print depicting Leiden University Library in 1610 is rather well known as a representation of an early modern scholarly library at work. The cabinet on the right is for Scaliger’s Oriental acquisitions (and reads so in better and larger reproductions of the print), displayed separately with a sense of institutional pride for housing such rare and exotic books.
This print depicting Leiden University Library in 1610 is rather well known as a representation of an early modern scholarly library at work. The cabinet on the right is for Scaliger’s Oriental acquisitions (and reads so in better and larger reproductions of the print), displayed separately with a sense of institutional pride for housing such rare and exotic books.

History

The study of Arabic at Leiden goes back to the late sixteenth century, when the university was established. The major figure of the earliest generation is Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609), the versatile and esteemed scholar who, through his fondness of collecting rare books, left a valuable collection behind that formed the nucleus of the Oriental Collection.  Academic study of Arabic was soon to follow.  The first scholar of Arabic was Franciscus Raphelengius (d. 1597), followed by two prominent scholars of the language: Thomas Erpenius (d. 1667), who wrote a grammar of Arabic and Jacobus Golius (d. 1667), who wrote an Arabic-Latin dictionary. The grammar book and dictionary of Erpenius and Golius remained widely read all over Europe up until the nineteenth century. The main driving force behind the pursuit of Semitic and Middle Eastern studies from this early period on was the study of the Bible and exegesis.

In addition to Arabic, Persian and Turkish were soon to become preferred languages of study due to Dutch political and economic interests in the Ottoman Empire, hence broadening the scope of the pursuit of knowledge of the Orient. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Arabic and Islamic studies were to be transformed by merging with the study of Indonesian languages and culture, a rapidly burgeoning field due to the colonial engagements of the Netherlands in the area.

Collection

Leiden’s large Oriental collection is divided into five sub-sections. The Hebraica, Judaica and Semitics collection consists of manuscripts and rare prints mainly in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, but also the languages of Ethiopia, Old South Arabic, Coptic and Armenian. The South and Central Asian Collections comprise material in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Lepcha. This collection is remarkably rich in maps and visual material. The South and Southeast Asian Collections with its rich textual and visual Malay-Indonesian collection forms an especially strong component of the entire Oriental collection. Although the acquisition of manuscripts for this collection goes back to the sixteenth century, the real explosion took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks to the needs of the colonial rule in the Netherland East Indies. The Japanese and Chinese collections, similarly, owes its strongest part, the Tokugawa era manuscripts and blockprints, to Dutch explorations on the Pacific ocean: the Dutch were the only European community permitted to reside on Japanese territory, though restrained to one island, the island of Deshima on Nagasaki Bay.

The Middle Eastern Collection houses the largest acquisition of the entire Oriental collections. This is the collection of 1,000 manuscripts inherited from Levinus Warner (d.1665), after whom the collection is sometimes referred to as Legatum Warnerianum, “Warner’s Bequest”.  Levinus Warner started out as a student of oriental languages at Leiden. He then moved to Istanbul and lived there from 1645 until the end of his life, first as secretary and translator to a trading Dutch resident, Nicolaas Ghisbrechti, and as a diplomat afterwards. From the beginning all through his years of consular work, he never lost his bookish interests and formed a large personal collection including works on poetry, history, theology, medicine, and folk literature. His collection brings together material in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, oftentimes annotated in Latin.  A remarkable acquisition of his is the private library of Haji Khalifa (Katib Çelebi), obtained through a local friend at an auction after the Ottoman scholar’s death in 1657.  The Leiden collection currently holds manuscripts from the collection of Warner as well as his extensive personal notes, which touch upon Turkish proverbs, the intricacies of Persian poetry, daily events in Istanbul and many other topics. These notes are mostly in Latin, though occasional snippets are to be found in Turkish or Arabic.

The acquisitions of the library continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mostly through the library’s purchases of individual collections or the bequests of individual benefactors. One remarkable example is the bequest of the Dutch businessman and diplomat A.P.H. Hotz (1855-1930). The bibliophile’s collection was obtained in 1934 and includes many travel books and early photographs, as well as well-preserved early modern manuscripts.  Mention should also be made of the large collection that was bought in the 1960s, which presumably belonged to Sultan Murad V (1840-1904) and his heirs.

The Leiden University library on Witte Singel.
The Leiden University library on Witte Singel.

Research Experience

The catalog of special collections is helpful for navigating the oriental collection, although it is far from complete. The online catalog should not be ignored, since it will yield results likely not covered in the print catalogs. For best results, researchers should use the online catalog in consultation with the following printed catalogs.

Jan Schmidt’s three volume Catalog of Turkish Manuscripts is a gem of thorough scholarship, containing detailed information on each manuscript included. For works in Arabic, Petrus Voorhoeve’s Handlist of Arabic Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Collections in the Netherlands is still indispensable. For Persian works, the researcher should refer to J.J. Witkam’s catalog of Persian manuscripts which is available in the reading room. Professor Witkam’s online cataloging project lists in digital format the library’s holdings acquired not only from the Middle East, but also from the South Asia and Southeast Asia, without regional division.

As the library has only recently begun to digitize its collection, only a small percentage of manuscripts have been digitized. In most cases, the reader will work with the original manuscript or print. The manuscripts and rare printed books are to be studied within the Special Collections reading room, using the necessary props. The reading room personnel are helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable. They all speak fluent English.

The collection is impressively user friendly. The reader places their requests online. The manuscripts then become available for pick-up within half an hour before 16:00, and the next morning if the request is placed after 16:00. Although there are no limits to the number of requests made, the reader is allowed to examine no more than two manuscripts at a time. This latter limitation does not apply to printed works.

Access

The Special Collections is open weekdays, 9.00 to 17.30 during the term and 9.00 am to 17.00 during the summer recess. To work at the collections, the reader must acquire a Leiden University guest card. The card can be acquired at the reception desk of the library in person, and is issued immediately. To acquire the card, the reader’s passport is required together with a fee of 30 Euros. Special discounts apply to the fee if the reader is a Dutch citizen or affiliated with a university in the Netherlands.

An important opportunity to keep in mind is the fellowships offered through the Scaliger Institute. The institute grants many research fellowships, in connection with the Brill and The Elsevier publishing houses, to researchers who want to explore the library’s holdings. For information, please visit the institute’s website.

Reproductions

The reader is allowed to photograph any material for free. For the purpose of use in publications, formal copies should be ordered through the library’s website. Online requests in this manner also stand as a viable option for readers who cannot visit the collection in person. Bear in mind that if the work has not been digitized yet, this process may take up to four weeks. The cost of a digital copy is 1 Euro per page.

Transportation, food, and other facilities

The library is located on Witte Singel, the main area where humanities buildings are located. It is a fifteen minute walk from Leiden’s Central Station, the hub of Leiden’s transportation. In terms of accommodation, finding short-term sublets in Leiden is easy during the summer months yet might prove difficult during the term. The Hague, which is a fifteen minute train ride away, is the next best option.

The library has a café which provides tosti (toasted sandwich, the staple lunch), baked goods and drinks. Richer lunch options are available, such as at the cafeteria of the Lipsius building right across the canal. The prices are reasonable in both cafes.

Contact Information

University Library (Main library and Humanities)

Witte Singel 27

2311 BG  Leiden
Special Collections Reading Room:
Tel: 071 – 5272857
email: specialcollections@library.leidenuniv.nl

Resources and Links

The website of the Special Collections department

Online Catalog, with links for ordering digital images

Aslıhan Gürbüzel is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University working on the cultural and intellectual history of the early modern Ottoman Empire, currently focusing on Sufism in seventeenth-century Istanbul.

Cite this, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, “Leiden Rare Books Library,” HAZİNE, https://hazine.info/2013/12/13/oriental-collections-at-leiden-university/, 13 December 2013.

 

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Central Zionist Archive

Written by Liora R. Halperin

The Central Zionist Archive (hereafter CZA) in Jerusalem is the main archival resource for scholars researching the history of the Zionist movement, both within Palestine/Israel and internationally, and the history of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) during the British Mandate and late Ottoman periods. Any scholar researching a topic that relates, either directly or indirectly, to the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine or the international institutions of the Zionist movement (e.g. the World Zionist Organization, the United Israel Appeal, or the Jewish Agency) will find the CZA to be an important archive.

The exterior of the Central Zionist Archive
The exterior of the Central Zionist Archive

History

The Central Zionist Archive was founded in Berlin in 1919 as the archive of the Zionist Movement; its goal was to collect the documentation of the branches of the Zionist movement located around the world, as well as the personal archives of key Zionist leaders. The first director of the archive, Georg Herlitz, began ordering the archive according to the organizational structure of the various offices that produced the documents in the collection. In the wake of the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the archive was moved to Israel and opened to the public in 1934. At this point, the collection’s focus expanded well beyond the history and bureaucratic activities of the global Zionist movement to include also the history of the Yishuv and Jewish settlement in Palestine. Alex Bein, the long-serving director of the archive, worked to realize the expansion of the collection as well as the transfer of Theodor Herzl’s archive to Palestine in 1937. Bein also gathered the personal archives of several other early Zionist figures. After being located for decades in the basement of the Zionist institutional offices on King George Street, the archive was moved into its current location in 1987.

Collection

Next to the Israel State Archives, the Central Zionist Archive is the largest archive in Israel. The Central Zionist Archive has, according to one estimate, about 80 million documents—a quantity which one writer described in 2007 as “ten kilometers of Zionism” (Anat Banin, “The Treasure Vault of the Jewish People” The Jewish Magazine, Hanukkah 2007). The CZA contains the archives of, among other bodies, the committees, subcommittees, and offices of the World Zionist Organization, as well as the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund, the United Israel Appeal (Keren Ha-Yesod), and the Jewish National Council (Va‘ad ha-Le’umi). It also holds the records of other Zionist organizations and institutions in countries around the world and in Palestine/Israel, the records of Zionist Congresses, and over 1500 personal archives as well as extensive collections of periodicals, images, and maps. Most of these documents were produced in bureaucratic offices, mainly in the twentieth century, with a smaller number of documents from the late nineteenth century and a growing collection oftwenty-first-century collections from currently active Zionist organizations around the world. Approximately one-third of these documents are from the period of the Holocaust, making the CZA an important source for materials pertaining to Zionist activity during the Second World War. It also has a large collection of newspapers, maps, and half a million photographs and negatives. The CZA also has a unit for family research, and charges a fee of 100 shekels for individuals and 150 for institutions to look into immigration records, primarily for those who entered the country between 1919 and 1974. It also possesses a large book collection.

A photograph from the CZA collections, this one of women at a public water tap in 1933
A photograph from the CZA collections, this one of women at a public water tap in 1933

The contents of the CZA’s collections and sub-collections are listed on the archive’s website, which was updated relatively recently and is user-friendly. Researchers are advised to use the online lists and come on the first day of research with an initial list of materials they wish to order.

It should be noted that the documents held in the Central Zionist archive, with a few exceptions, were those either created or received by the Zionist movement, or, more specifically, associates of the Zionist Organization, as opposed to affiliates of the Labor Zionist or Revisionist movements. A wide range of organizations associated with the Zionist labor movement including MAPAI, Ha-Shomer Ha-Tza‘ir, the Kibbutz HaMe’uhad, the Histadrut, as well as the archives of the Revisionist Movement and of local municipalities, are held in other organizational or municipal archives located around Israel. Moreover, while the Central Zionist Archive is a central archive for the history of pre-state Zionism and the proto-state institutions of the Yishuv, the archives of the British mandatory government in Palestine are not held at the Central Zionist Archive, but rather at the Israel State Archives, where they were transferred after the creation of the state. A basic understanding of the structure and political diversity of the Zionist movement is essential to predict whether a given document or collection is likely to be held at the CZA or a separate archive elsewhere in Israel.

While the CZA holds materials from the Jewish community of Palestine up to 1948, it also contains and continues to collect the documents of certain international Zionist organizations outside the direct purview of the Israeli state. Given the worldwide nature of the Zionist movement, the archive contains materials from all major sites of Zionist movement activity including Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and South America. It contains materials from Palestine and from other Middle Eastern locations where the Zionist movement was active. Given the global reach and extent of these materials, the archive has important information on other topics, for example, global Jewish communities, resistance to Zionism, major events in Jewish history, the Arab population of Palestine, etc. However, visitors should plan their research mindful of the explicitly political and ideological logic—chronicling the history of the Zionist movement—by which the collection was assembled. The bulk of the collection is in Hebrew, but Zionist records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are more likely to be in German, and the records and correspondence of Zionist organizations around the world will likely be in the state languages of their respective countries.

Research Experience

The collections are organized, by and large, with reference to a document’s institutional place of production. In other words, the structure of the collections follows the structure of the institutions from which they came. Each top-level archival designation refers to a different institution. Some of the largest are the Va’ad Ha-Le’umi (Jewish National Council, archive code J), the Jewish Agency (archive code S), the Jewish National Fund (archive code KKL), Keren Ha-Yesod (United Israel Appeal, archive code KH), Zionist Organization Offices in various cities (archive code Z), and the Zionist Commission (archive code L). The number following the initial letter usually refers to a particular office or committee within the organization (e.g. J2 or S25). The number following the slash is the folder number. Personal archives have designations starting with the letter A. Although it is possible to find files by keyword, it is helpful to pay attention to the top-level letter and number for any given source in order to understand accurately its bureaucratic origin.

There are two basic ways to access catalogs. The computerized catalog is the main way to search for files, and one can search by keyword, as well as by year and other parameters. The operation of the computerized catalog is not immediately intuitive, and researchers should plan to ask for help from the reading room staff.

The second way to search the collections are through the bound volumes for each archival unit, which are organized by letter and are located to the left of the main desk in the reading room. Some of these volumes are missing, but if the one you need is on the shelf, the low-tech browsing method can be a useful way to understand the overall organization of each archival unit. Researchers normally request material through the computer system. In the event that the computer system is inoperable, researchers may continue to make requests using the paper slips. In my experience, computer outages are not uncommon, but this issue may have been resolved.

Thanks to support from the Judaica Division of the Harvard University library, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and the Claims Convention, the organization that distributes and allocates the funds of German Holocaust reparation payments to Israel, the CZA is digitizing its collections and researchers should expect that a good proportion of their documents will be viewed not on paper but on the computer terminals located in the reading room. Digitized documents are not always high quality, and, except for maps and other full-color documents, scans are in black and white. It is therefore occasionally difficult to read documents. Moreover, the functions for zooming and moving between pages are sometimes frustrating and the overall experience of dealing with scanned documents may be more difficult and less efficient than handling paper documents. In cases where the digital copies of documents are illegible, one can request paper files, but there is not an organized or streamlined procedure for such requests.

There are five pull times over the course of the day: 9:00, 10:00, 11:30, 13:00, 14:00. Five items (a book, a folder, etc.) may be requested at each of these times, for a maximum of twenty-five items over the course of a day. This means that researchers who intend to look at a large number of files will need several days before all their files can be brought. However, once a set of files is requested, it can be stored on a hold shelf indefinitely as long as you are still working with it. Files that are scanned can be accessed at any time, so it makes sense to start the day focusing on what files need to be ordered, and then work with scanned files while waiting for the paper files to arrive.

Central Zionist Archive 2
Files, waiting for the researcher…

The reading room staff are helpful. It is important for researchers to enter with the mindset that they need to continue asking questions if they find the initial responses insufficient. The reading room staff speaks some English but researchers who do not know Hebrew often find this to be a real impediment to their research. It is also not a bad idea to ask other archive users for help if the archive staff is away from the desk. The reading room staff, though they can answer questions about the procedures of ordering files or making copies, are not the ones to answer research questions or questions about the organization of the archive. Instead, researchers should turn to Batia Leshem, Head of Institutional Archives, or Rochelle Rubenstein, Deputy Director of Archival Matters, for those sorts of conversations. Their offices, as well as the offices of other archivists, are located one level below the reading room. Ask at the security desk in the lobby for specific directions to their offices.

The reading room is sufficiently comfortable. It tends to have enough room for the number of researchers who are normally working there without feeling either empty or overcrowded. It is air-conditioned. Researchers are asked to deposit their belongings in a locker outside and not bring in food or water. There is not an extremely rigorous search process in this regard but researchers should be prepared to abide by these regulations.

There are a wide range of reference volumes in the reading room itself, including dictionaries between Hebrew and a variety of other languages, a range of different historical and biographical encyclopedias, and a range of books about the history of the Zionist movement.

Access

The archive is open between 8:00 and 15:30, Sunday through Thursday. Users should be aware that the archive is closed for all major Jewish and Israeli national holidays, including often the whole day or half day of the eve of a holiday. Given the seasonal arrangement of holidays, this means that researchers planning travel in September-October and April-June in particular should consult a calendar and make sure that they are not planning research during a period of multiple holiday closures. In addition, the archive closes for a break in mid-August (call ahead before you come since closure information is not always posted on the website).

Access to the archive is granted after the submission of a short application. Researchers should make an application appointment and come to the archive with their Israeli identification number or foreign passport number.. Researchers have gained access without a formal letter of introduction, but it is not a bad idea to have one, especially for doctoral students. Once one is in the system, one does not have to fill out subsequent paperwork for future visits, even if one is working on an entirely different project, but it is helpful to consult with the archive staff to orient oneself around each new topic.

The archive is wheelchair accessible.

Reproductions

Researchers are asked to pay (as of 2012) 40 agorot per page for photographs taken on a personal digital camera. This is charged through self-reporting. It is useful to be able to customize one’s own images, zoom or crop as desired. Also, this is the cheapest form of reproduction available.

If one wishes to have photocopies made of paper files, they must be marked on a special ordering sheet and cost 1 shekel per page. They are normally ready within a week.

Documents that have been scanned cost 1.50 shekel per page if printed and 2 shekalim per page if emailed and they must be ordered and take some time to arrive (this is another reason why it is often a boon to chance upon files that have not yet been scanned that you can photograph with your own camera).

Transportation and Food

The CZA is located directly across from the Jerusalem Central Bus Station and next door to the Binyane Ha-Umah International Convention Center. The CZA is extremely well serviced by public transit. The light rail makes a stop outside the Central Bus Station and any bus, whether in the city or inter-city, that serves the Central Bus Station will do (from the bus station cross Jaffa Road and Zalman Shazar Ave. Follow Josef Herlitz Rd off of Zalmar Shazar Ave to the right of the Convention Center to get there.) In addition, it is useful to know that it is only about a twenty-minute walk between the Central Zionist Archive and the National Library at Hebrew University’s Giv’at Ram campus. This proximity between institutions is useful to maximize one’s working hours, as the CZA closes at 15:30, while the National Library remains open until 19:45.

There are a couple food options near the Central Zionist Archive. A small food cart on Zalman Shazar Ave. near the bus stops sells snacks and basic prepared sandwiches of poor quality. The other option is crossing over to the Central Bus Station, which has a food court with decent fast-food style options. The bus station is also a reasonably pleasant place to get coffee or a pastry and it has free wi-fi and various shops. If you want to make the most of the research hours between 8:00 and 15:30, however, the best idea is to pack a lunch.

Miscellaneous:

The archive occasionally hosts lectures and symposia related to topics in the history of the Zionist movement. Sometimes it also organizes small exhibits in its lobby space.

Future Plans and Rumors

The archive plans to continue digitizing files.

Contact information

Website: www.zionistarchives.org.il

Address: 4 Zalman Shazar Avenue, Jerusalem

Director: Yigal Sitry

Phone number: 972-2-620-4800

Fax: 972-2-620-4837

Main contact email: cza@wzo.org.il

Other emails and phone numbers: 

Academic Director Dr. Motti Friedman 02-620-4803 motif@jazo.org.il
Administrative Director Gili Simha​ ​02-6204800 ​ gilis@wzo.org.il​
Deputy director for archival matters Rochelle Rubinstein​ 02-6204816 rocheller@wzo.org.il​

Heads of Departments:

Institutional archives Batia Leshem 02-6204818 batial@wzo.org.il
Private archives Simone Schliachter 02-6204817 simones@wzo.org.il
Photograph Collections Anat Banin 02-6204825 anatb@wzo.org.il
Graphic Collections and Maps Nechama Kanner 02-6204810 nechamaka@wzo.org.il

Resources and Links:

Search catalog online

3 December 2013

Liora R. Halperin is assistant professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history, Jewish-Palestinian relations in Palestine and Israel, language ideology and policy, and the politics surrounding nation formation in Palestine in the years leading up to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Her first book, tentatively titled Babel in Zion: Hebrew and the Politics of Language in Palestine, will be published by Yale University Press in 2014. 

Cite this: Liora R. Halperin, “Central Zionist Archive,” HAZINE, https://hazine.info/2013/12/03/central-zionist-archive/, 3 Dec 2013

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Tahrir Documents

Written by Alex Winder

Tahrir Documents is a collection of pamphlets, newsletters, signs, poems, and other texts gathered in and around Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, between March 2011 and May 2012. The physical documents are housed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Special Collections at the Charles E. Young Research Library. However, all documents are available online at www.TahrirDocuments.org as scanned PDF files with accompanying English translations. The archive seeks to create a record of the print culture of the Egyptian uprising against Hosni Mubarak and its aftermath.

Tahrir Square, January 25, 2012: an archive in the making
Tahrir Square, January 25, 2012: an archive in the making

History

Tahrir Documents was founded in 2011 through the efforts of a group of American graduate students in Cairo and explicitly states its lack of affiliation “with any political organization, Egyptian or otherwise.” Generally speaking, documents were gathered once a week on Fridays, when they were distributed to crowds in Tahrir Square. They were then scanned and translated by volunteers, primarily Egyptians and Americans, a number of whom were students of the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA). The founders of Tahrir Documents intended the archive to illustrate the richness and diversity of print culture in Tahrir Square at a time when media discourse on the “Egyptian Revolution” gave primacy to the impact of online social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Further, translating these documents into English represented an attempt to give the diverse and polyvalent texts available in Tahrir Square a wider English-speaking readership. Efforts to collect and translate documents continued through May 2012, at which point no further documents were added to the collection.

Collection

The collection includes a wide range of documents collected in and around Tahrir Square from spring 2011 to spring 2012, including newsletters and broadsheets, pamphlets, announcements, advertisements, and poetry. The archive also includes a small number of largely text-based signs held by protestors at Tahrir Square. Though most of the documents are stand-alone pieces, there are several newsletters of which multiple issues were collected and translated. Each document exists in the original along with a full English language translation. The date of collection and of translation are included on the Tahrir Documents website.

The Tahrir Documents website includes 567 documents. In this respect it differs from other efforts to document and archive the Egyptian uprising of 2011 and the events that followed, such as University on the Square, R-Shief, or the Committee to Document the 25th January Revolution, which include a much wider range of material (electronic media, photographs, oral histories, music, and so on). The archive’s self-imposed limits are generally speaking a boon for researchers in that they result in a relatively coherent collection—one knows, for example, that all of these documents were produced in Egypt and were physically present in the space of Tahrir Square on the date collected—but the archive’s discontinuation in May 2012 can be frustrating in light of subsequent events in Egypt.

The Research Experience

All documents in the collection are digitized and available online, making them easily available to researchers throughout the world. Scans or photographs of the original documents are posted with translations on the Tahrir Documents website and can be downloaded by users. Documents are posted in chronological order according to translation date and are also divided into seven main categories according to subject: Revolution, Politics, Solidarity, Culture, Constitution, Regime, and Religion. Each category includes a number of sub-categories, and documents are frequently listed under multiple categories or sub-categories. Most useful, perhaps, is the ability to search the full texts of translations for the entire collection. Unfortunately, it is not possible to conduct searches in Arabic. As the documents were translated by a large group of volunteers, some inconsistencies in translation or transliteration do at times crop up; for the most part, however, this is not a huge hurdle (most names and places are transliterated in modified International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies style, for example). In general, the interface is easy to use and accessing the documents poses no difficulties.

Broadly speaking, these documents would be of interest to researchers of post–January 2011 Egypt, especially the political culture of Tahrir Square. Those whose focus extends to Arab political culture more generally will also find rich primary material, as the documents include political tracts, manifestos, and explanatory notes from political currents ranging from salafi to revolutionary socialist. Indeed, given the location where these documents were collected, it is not surprising that the vast majority are explicitly political in content; however, the location-specific—rather than subject-specific—method of collection has resulted in the inclusion of some surprising and unusual pieces. Those more interested in Egyptian popular culture, for example, will also find poems, fiction, and advertisements collected here.

Sample document on TahrirDocuments.org
Sample document on TahrirDocuments.org

Access

The Tahrir Documents web site is easily accessible. Those who want to access the original documents must go to the Department of Special Collections at the Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA. Visitors have to register and documents are delivered in one to two days. The Department of Special Collections is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday, except during holidays; non-UCLA visitors must be over eighteen years old and present a government-issued photo identification to obtain an access-only card from the circulation desk at the Young Research Library.

Upcoming News and Rumors

The online component of Tahrir Documents will officially migrate to a UCLA library website in the coming months. This transition will bring with it a new interface and metadata, which should allow for new ways of searching and filtering results.

Contact information

Tahrir Documents

Email: tahrirdocuments@gmail.com

Charles E. Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections

Email: mspec-coll@library.ucla.edu

Phone: 310-825-4988

Resources and Links

Tahrir Documents

Interview with librarian David Hirsch about the collection of the documents

November 22, 2013

About the author: Alex Winder is a doctoral candidate at New York University working on twentieth-century Palestinian history.

Cite this: Alex Winder, “Tahrir Documents,” HAZİNE, 22/11/2103, https://hazine.info/2013/11/22/tahrir-documents/

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Red Crescent Archives (Turkey)

by Chris Gratien and Seçil Yılmaz

The Turkish Red Crescent (Kızılay, formerly Hilâl-i Ahmer) is a charity organization founded during the late Ottoman period on the model of the Red Cross societies. Its activities in the areas of medicine, care for prisoners of war, and other social services, particularly during the World War I period and the early years of the Turkish Republic, make the archives of this organization a vital resource for historians interested in medicine, public health, war, and charity alike during this formative period. Recently, its archives in Ankara have been made public through a searchable online catalog, opening an exciting new field of research for Ottoman and Turkish historians.

Source: kızılay.org
Source: kızılay.org

History

The Ottoman Red Crescent was founded in 1868 partly in response to the experience of the Crimean War, in which disease overshadowed battle as the main cause of death and suffering among Ottoman soldiers. It was the first Red Crescent society of its kind and one of the most important charity organizations in the Muslim world. Its role in battlefield care made it integral to late Ottoman war efforts. The Red Crescent also played a critical role in the development of the young Turkish Republic’s health institutions.

In 2006, a major overhaul of these archives was initiated to make them available to researchers. This includes a cataloging effort similar to the organization of the Ottoman State Archives (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi), wherein each document is cataloged, described, and shortly thereafter digitized. Most of the documents pertaining to the 1868-1911 period have been cataloged and efforts continue for later periods.

Red Crescent Relief Efforts in Jerusalem c1917 (source: US Library of Congress)
Red Crescent Relief Efforts in Jerusalem c1917 (source: US Library of Congress)

Collection

The Red Crescent archives contain a variety of documents pertaining to health and health services in the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey. For the Ottoman period (including World War I), these documents almost exclusively concern budget and funding issues along with services pertaining to war, particularly the 1877-78 Russo-Ottoman War (93 Harbi), the Italian invasion of Libya, the Balkan Wars, and of course, the First World War. There is very little overlap between the collections of the Ottoman archives and the Red Crescent.

In addition to offering a glimpse at late Ottoman medical institutions, social historians of the Ottoman Empire will also be drawn to documentation regarding Ottoman prisoners of war, which includes letters about and by Ottoman soldiers. The Red Crescent boasts over 300,000 POW cards from all sides of the conflict containing the names and origins of prisoners, their place of capture, and sometimes other biographical or health information. The collection also contain letters and requests from prisoners of war during the conflict. In this regard, researchers of other regions such as Europe or South Asia will find these archives useful as the Red Crescent was the intermediary between the Allies and Allied prisoners held in Ottoman territories.

During the Republican period and even during the War of Independence, the Red Crescent took on an increasingly national character and expanded its function to issues of health in the cities and countryside. Though it has not been well-studied, the contents of the collection indicate that the Red Crescent was part and parcel of early Republican health services in rural settings, where relatively few institutions had been established by the Ottoman state. Here, there is somewhat more overlap with the collections of the Başbakanlık Republican Archives, though the Red Crescent may prove to be much richer than the former in the area of health as its catalog grows.

In addition to archival documents, there is also a decent collection of visual materials such as photographs and postcards.

The collections include several varieties of documents, including hospital reports, health statistics, personal letters, account books, and reports by health inspectors. Due to the organization of the digital catalog, researchers cannot access files or folders in their sequential order. The archive’s online search function only provides individual files with no connection to surrounding material. In order to identify documents of a particular variety or source, researchers will need to identify particular boxes of interest or the names of particular officials or organizations associated with the research topic and search using these terms (more on this below).

The contents of the Red Crescent’s collections are largely unexplored by researchers and not fully known to the organization itself. According to the archive’s website, there are some 1500 boxes and 550 bound notebooks in Ottoman and French from the period beginning with the organizations founding until the language reforms in 1928. However, it is our experience that the contents are a bit more varied than this. For example, this sample document that we have provided originates from the Egyptian Red Crescent and is entirely in Arabic.

Researchers will need a command of modern Turkish to be effective, though of course, most of the documents from the Ottoman period are in Ottoman Turkish.

Stacks
The original documents are stored at the archives, but researchers will not be issued original documents. Rather, researchers must consult materials in the digital environment unless they have not been digitized. (Source: kizilay.org)

The Research Experience:

For researchers, the main question regarding the Red Crescent archives is whether or not to go to the physical archives itself. The archive is located in the Etimesgut neighborhood of the Ankara suburbs, and while researchers are free to work there, there is no proper workspace. Moreover, researchers will be expected to order documents through the website and receive photocopies by mail regardless of whether they go there or not. Thus, it is possible for the entire process to be handled through correspondence. Here, we will make the argument for a visit to the archives in person and explain in which situations this is necessary.

Since this archive is relatively hard to use and access, a trip to Red Crescent Archives is probably not worth your time unless you are working on specific issues related to health, medicine, prisoners, or war, though it is always worth searching the catalog to see what might be available remotely.

There are several factors that will encourage committed scholars to make a visit arising from the limitations of the catalog. Many of the descriptions are short or obscure. Some, for example, only mention the individual who composed them, making them utterly impossible to find via keyword search unless one knows to search for that individual. Moreover, the one sentence description may prove inadequate in determining whether or not to purchase the fairly pricy photocopies (more on this below). Going to the archive in person will allow you to see entire folders (which represent the original file boxes) of the documents, which usually have a shared theme or point of origin. This also enables you to get a closer look at the actual contents of documents before ordering them and gives you access to some paper documents that have not yet been digitized. If you are already in Turkey, a visit to the archive will ultimately save you a great deal of time and money, and it will surely yield better research results.

Kızılay Kütüpanesi
Red Crescent Library and Museum (from kızılay.org)

Access

The archive is open weekdays from 9:00 to 18:00 and closes for a one-hour lunch break at noon. Researchers are asked to contact the archivists before coming, as completing the application and request process by email will expedite the research process (information here). A passport is sufficient to gain access, but bring a second form of ID to leave with the guards. Laptops are forbidden as is photography. Spoken Turkish is absolutely essential to use the archive effectively, even though some documents pertaining to foreign POWs will be in English and French. The staff is extremely friendly and helpful, and you will likely be the only researcher there on any given day. Wheelchair access may be an issue as the reading room is on the second floor.

Reproductions

The archive’s reproduction fees are relatively expensive, as revenue generated from photocopies are considered a donation to the society. Photocopies cost 50 kuruş per pose, while scans of all documents cost 10 TL per pose. The archive does not fulfill reproduction requests on site, so researchers must provide a mailing address in order to receive copies or scans. Requests are fulfilled promptly and copies are generally obtained within one or two weeks.

Transportation and Food

Although there is a neighborhood in the heart of Ankara named Kızılay, researchers will be disappointed to find the site of the Red Crescent archives is in a much more remote location in Etimesgut, a northern suburb of Ankara accessible mainly by minibus. It occupies two buildings at the back of a large site operated by the Red Crescent, so it will be normal to be a little disoriented during the first visit. There is essentially nowhere to eat near the site. There is a serviceable cafeteria used by the employees, who will likely offer you to accompany them to lunch if you are just there for a day or two. In general though, we recommend researchers pack a lunch.

Miscellaneous

The library staff will give researchers a short tour of the modest museum and library at the archives upon their visit. This museum contains some important visual materials, artifacts, and books and publications by and about the organization that may be consulted by researchers. If you are doing extensive research at the Red Crescent, particularly on the institution itself, inquire about the contents of the museum as it may contain some very interesting materials.

Future Developments

As the digitization and cataloging process is ongoing, it is always worth checking in periodically to see if anything on your topic has been added.

Contact information

Address: Arşiv Yönetimi Bölümü

Türk Kızılayı Caddesi  No:6

Etimesgut – ANKARA

Archives Department Administrator

Hande UZUN KÜLCÜ

Tel: +90 (312) 293 64 26

handeu@kizilay.org.tr

Fax: +90 (312) 293 64 36

Resources and Links:

Red Crescent Archives Catalog (in Turkish)

Red Crescent Library Catalog

Full PDF of Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s 1879 work on the Red Crescent’s Foundation (in Ottoman)

Sample Document

 

About the Authors

Chris Gratien is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University

Seçil Yılmaz is a doctoral candidate at City University of New York.

Cite this: Chris Gratien and Seçil Yılmaz, “Red Crescent Archives (Turkey),” Hazine, 13 November 2013,  https://hazine.info/2013/11/13/turkish-red-crescent-kizilay-archives-ankara/

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Researching in Digitized Libraries

(Editors’ Note: This is the first of a series of essays that explore different methods and techniques for conducting research and that delve deeper into the histories and ethics of the archives themselves.)

How Digitization has Transformed Manuscript Research: New Methods for Early Modern Islamic Intellectual History

Written by Nir Shafir

Scholars often treat manuscript libraries only as repositories of unpublished primary sources. We show up at a library, request a manuscript or two, and leave shortly thereafter with a digital or paper copy in hand or we sit at a desk for hours each day, transcribing a manuscript word by word. In most traditional manuscript libraries, this method made sense. Librarians might only pull manuscripts once a day, or even once a week, bringing only a couple of manuscripts at a time. In such conditions, the most efficient course of action is to peruse a library’s catalog, request a few key manuscripts, and read them closely.

Today, however, the mass digitization of manuscripts is blurring the long held boundaries between manuscript libraries and archives and altering the act of research in the process. Scholars often view the changes that digitization entails in a negative light as the physical document is increasingly removed from the hands of the researcher. Here, though, I would like to take a different approach and explore the true possibilities provided by digitization as scholars are able to ask new questions, discover unknown texts, and gain a different understanding of intellectual life in the early modern Islamic world in particular. My belief is that a fundamental shift has occurred now that researchers can view twenty, fifty, or even one hundred manuscripts a day rather than two to three. In what follows, I examine some of the techniques we can use and the insights we can gain when given the opportunity to look at thousands of manuscripts during a research period. Others, of course, have written about the new possibilities for historical scholarship offered by the digitization of archival material, often focusing on the chance for group projects by geographically dispersed researchers. Research with digital manuscripts, though, is still largely an individual affair that requires spending many a long hour laboring away in a dimly lit library, one’s face illuminated only by the glow of a computer monitor. The conclusions below might seem obvious to those researchers already at work in digitized manuscript libraries, but I think it is worth discussing openly the impact of these technologies on the way we research. I hope that my remarks will not only open a discussion among researchers but also inform librarians and archivists as they continue to digitize their collections.

Bookcase by Manolo Valdes
Bookcase by Manolo Valdes

Medieval Precedents and Early Modern Challenges

Our current model of manuscript research is largely the result of the preoccupation of earlier generations of scholars with the medieval Islamic period (c. 800-1200). Until recently, scholars saw this period as an ideal golden age, a time when Islamic thought reached its intellectual climax in all fields. The number of surviving manuscripts was relatively small and those texts that had survived are often only found in renditions from the early modern period (1400-1800). For scholars who studied the medieval period with a “golden-age” mindset, the exercise at hand was to take the few remaining copies of a medieval text and prepare a critical edition in order to rid the text of the corrupting accretions of the ensuing centuries. The desired result was an ur-text in the form of a printed book, reflecting the original intentions of the properly ascribed author that scholars could then use for further analysis. We bear the legacy of this model today whether we use the fruits of these scholars’ labor in research libraries or continue to create critical editions or catalogs ourselves.

When we attempt to study the relatively neglected early modern period (1400-1800) a new set of challenges emerges. The quantity of material overwhelms scholars. There is simply more: more authors, more manuscripts, more copyists, more readers, more marginal notes. Librarians estimate that two to three million Arabic-script manuscripts currently exist in the world, the vast majority copied in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, today stowed away in public or private collections. On top of this, many of the authors and the titles are largely unknown to most scholars. Those texts and authors, like Evliya Çelebi or Mustafa Ali, that are traditionally well-known to scholars of the Ottoman Empire only comprise a tiny sliver of this vast corpus of materials. In reality, I would estimate, albeit unscientifically, that we only know of 10-15% of the works and authors of the early modern period, and even these we often know superficially. What little secondary literature that exists can likewise mislead us as to which treatises and authors were actually popular and widely read in the period. It is my personal belief that this relative surfeit of material is due to a gradual expansion of manuscript production and a transformation in reading practices although such claims are relatively under-researched.

Using a Library as an Archive

By changing the manuscript library into an archive, digitization provides us one set of tools to tackle this vast corpus of material and to explore this altered world of early modern readership. To explain what I mean by this phrase let me briefly generalize about the traditional manner of working in manuscript libraries (although I readily recognize that the line separating manuscript libraries and archives is rather artificial). In a traditional manuscript library, you are limited to requesting only a few volumes a day. Often you are allowed only to look at one volume at a time. Since it is tedious to request repeatedly the same manuscript, which might take a few days to arrive, you take careful notes on the manuscript before returning it. The process as a whole takes quite a bit of time and so you limit yourself to those manuscripts that are directly relevant to the research project, already listed in the catalog, rather than discovering the plethora of new material. A digitized library, on the other hand, allows one to view numerous manuscripts, each copy connected to another author or work, and therefore to jump from one to another within seconds. In this sense, the manuscript library becomes a sort of archive as researchers can quickly begin to dredge numerous unknown authors and works from the depths of the library in the same way that researchers working with documents can slowly piece them together to create a larger picture.

The key to such research is a good electronic catalog that keeps texts organized by their original volume. Most works written in the Islamic world before the twentieth century, save extremely long ones, were not individual volumes or codices. Instead, they were grouped together into miscellanies called mecmua (tr.)/majmu‘as (ar.). Even early printed works from the nineteenth century often follow this format. The main value of a mecmua is that it is a collection of texts, meaning that each text often has some sort of association with the other. Mecmuas are compiled through different means. Sometimes a scribe would copy them as a series. Other times they exist as one person’s personal notes, with additions by later readers. Alternatively, a later reader can take a number of unbound works and bind them into a single volume. On rare occasions, the collected texts were simply randomly assembled. These mecmuas can be the collected essays of one specific author or a collection on a theme, such as one particular legal question, or they can be a group of similarly minded texts and authors. By looking at mecmuas, even simply through a catalog that lists them together, you can start to understand which texts were read with one another, that is, you begin to discover the intertextuality of a scholarly world and thus enter the minds of early modern people. In this fashion, you can begin to break out of the straightjacket of well-known texts and discover those thousands of (relatively) unknown authors.

My personal method, which is only one of many possibilities, is to start my research with the names of a few authors or treatises. Even a few keywords will do. Let us use dreams as an example. You type “rüya” or “rü’ya” or “ruya” into the computer catalog and fifty or so results are returned. To gain more results, you type in “rü’y” or “rüy.” You start examining the search results, one by one, taking notes of authors and titles. You look at the works in mecmuas, paying attention to those other texts compiled alongside. Often the process brings up other texts on dreams that do not necessarily have the word “dream” in the title. This then gives you more titles and author names to search. You can then take each of these authors and search them by name. Some are minor characters with only a few other treatises, others are famous authors with hundreds of treatises, yet others are false attributions. You can then look at the other treatises by each author to see if they also deal with dreams and to get a sense of the other issues that were important to them. Slowly you develop a sense of what genres dealt with dreams and visions and the important personalities that are commonly cited. You find that there are dream interpretation manuals, treatises on the veracity of dreams, and a whole line of debate on visions of the Prophet Muhammad. You can gauge which are medieval copies of old treatises, new copies of medieval treatises, or relatively new works made in the early modern period.

Even works that are titled incorrectly or vaguely, like “a treatise on dreams,” can be valuable. The false attribution is helpful in and of itself as it is often the result of a mental connection made by a reader centuries ago, picked up by an unsuspecting cataloger. Vague titles that refer to a work generically or topically rather than by its actual name can often point to a more well-known treatise whose title never contained the word “dream.” Alternatively, it could be a piece that circulated anonymously and that readers or scribes attributed to various famous figures.  After surveying the texts in this fashion, you can start to ascertain the correct titles and authors, often simply overlooked by catalogers, or by comparing the texts to other versions.

Once you find an author of interest, start by listing all of his works and every copy of each of his works. Then as you start to scan through them, look again at the mecmua in which each text is located and take note of recurrent treatises or those that pique your interest. When you look at the treatise, make sure to look at the colophon and note the copy date and the copyist as well as any marginal notes and the notes’ authors. If the author or a later reader has written a table of contents, see what they emphasize and how they organize the material.  Then you look at the mecmua as a whole, attempting to see if it was copied by the same scribe or sewn together at a later date. (If the same scribe wrote a mecmua then you can use the neighboring works in the mecmua that possess copy dates to estimate the copy date of other treatises.) If the digital copy is of sufficient quality, examine the paper type, the binding, and the sewing to gauge the overall value of the book—whether it was an expensive or cheap volume. Look at ownership statements and library endowment stamps and compare them to the reference lists. Each offers a valuable piece of information. Then you can search the names of the copyist and owners, sometimes coming up with their own works or other copies. Each time you find an intriguing treatise or author, follow that lead to see what associations you can build up. With authors who possess relatively modest oeuvres, with perhaps five to fifteen in a library, you can complete this process fairly quickly. Authors with hundreds of copies of their works will need days of scrutiny.

In the process of all this surveying you not only gain a sense of a field of literature and its authors, you also come across a great deal of minor but important minutiae hidden away in the pages of the manuscripts. You encounter favorite poems, rants, announcements of births, descriptions of historical events, legal rulings, medicinal recipes, lists of books and more. You can use these seemingly trivial asides to find new figures or to contextualize a text, assuming you can pin this material to the correct period, as any later reader could have added these bits. Catalogers often skip the personal notes and thoughts of readers and copyists since they do not necessarily have a discrete author or title, though they are often some of the most valuable sections of manuscripts. You also find many cataloging mistakes, whole treatises skipped over in haste or simply ignored because they did not appear to be worthwhile and “complete” texts. Often the most obscurely or generically labeled treatise is the most interesting, something that a cataloger overlooked because it was too hard to properly identify and describe.

Digitization as Opportunity

In short, the method I outlined above starts with a few figures and slowly establishes a network of people, places, and titles. Each new discovery becomes a new node in this world of early modern thought that can lead us to even more authors and titles. In some sense, you are creating a personal catalog or map, but rather than organizing material by alphabetical author or generalized topic, this catalog connects the writers, readers, and books of a period. Once you achieve a grasp of a period as a whole, you can then focus on particular works and read them closely. The intention of such research is never to replace the close examination of a text but rather to chart the relatively unknown intellectual world of early modern Islamic societies so you can accurately choose the most relevant texts to read.

Of course, you can do such work with the physical manuscripts, but digitization makes it practical and efficient. When you can look at twenty, fifty, one hundred manuscripts in the same day, side by side, following whatever lead you might come across, research that might have taken five years can be done in a year. Moreover, a good digital catalog allows you to search across multiple manuscripts for pieces of titles or author names in a keystroke rather than flipping through the indices of multiple volumes.

There are downsides to the digitization of manuscripts. Scholars often lament, and rightfully so, the inability to interact tactilely with a physical copy, to sense its dimensions and quality with more than just a doubly distant pair of eyes. Employees digitizing the manuscripts often forget to photograph the bindings and covers. The best manuscript libraries allow researchers to access the originals if necessary, though many do not. Some libraries combine the worst of both worlds, forcing researchers to wait for days to read a few digital copies at a time as well as refusing them the privilege of viewing the actual manuscript. Finally, a library is only as good as its catalog. If catalogs, whether paper or electronic, do not accurately list basic information or do not display the mecmua as a whole, and instead treat every treatise as an independent work, then research becomes even more difficult and inefficient. Finally, the true benefits of working with digital manuscripts only become apparent when you have tens of thousands of manuscripts to browse. Only then can you easily track down all the different copies of a treatise and see, within a few seconds, what else the author may have written. For the moment, I am of the opinion that there is only one possible location for such research—Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul—although its catalog leaves much to be desired. The other major libraries, like Dar al-Kutub in Cairo, are a long way off from complete digitization.

Despite these frustrations, I still think that the digitization of manuscripts provides unique solutions to the problem of studying early modern intellectual history in particular. We can discover many of the poorly known authors and treatises of a period (that is, poorly known to us) in an efficient manner without having to rely on sheer chance. In this sense, it might have less to offer to those researchers studying medieval Islamic societies as the vast majority of mecmuas are from the early modern period. Perhaps most importantly of all, it allows us to address that most elusive question of readership and reception. Only when we can quickly go through twenty or thirty manuscripts in a few hours, looking at comments, ownership marks and more can you start making sense of the circulation and reception of these texts. We can pay attention to the short, sundry pamphlet-like literature that was so prevalent in the early modern period, rather than focus on one grand, though seldom-read text. Digitization allows us to access the expanded world of early modern readership. No longer chained to one ur-text, we can compare the many variants and changes of a text. By paying attention to this material world of manuscript reception, we might be able to find a new path between seeing these texts either purely as repositories of facts or as representations. In this sense, although digitization has distanced researchers from the material text itself, it has simultaneously refocused our attention on the manuscript as a medium worthy of study and respect.

(Many thanks to the friends and colleagues who commented on earlier draft. Readers’ comments and thoughts are welcome and encouraged.)

_______________________________________________________

Nir Shafir is a doctoral candidate at UCLA working on early modern intellectual history and history of science in the Ottoman Empire

8 November 2013

Cite this: Nir Shafir, “How digitization has transformed manuscript research: new methods for early modern Islamic intellectual history,” HAZİNE, 8 November 2013, https://hazine.info/2013/11/08/digitized_manuscript_libraries/

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The National Archives (United Kingdom)

The National Archives is the official state repository for the United Kingdom and is situated in Kew Gardens, London. Among the archive’s 11 million records, comprising hundreds of millions of documents, are vast numbers of items relating to the history of interactions between the peoples of the British Isles and the Middle East from the Crusades to colonial rule. As well as documents in European languages, The National Archives contains a significant collection of documents in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian.

British Archives
The National Archives (United Kingdom). Photo courtesy of Michael Talbot.

History

The National Archives holds records of the English and subsequently the British state dating back to the eleventh century. Often still known by one of its former names, the Public Record Office (PRO), the archive owes its current form to a law passed in 1838 aimed at gathering the scattered and often poorly-kept documents of the British government and judicial system. The current collection represents the merger by 2006 of four major holders of British archival records: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office (founded in 1786); the Public Record Office (1838); the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1869); and the Office of Public Sector Information (2005). These collections in their sum cover almost every conceivable aspect of the United Kingdom’s foreign, domestic, military, and civil history. In addition, it holds a number of papers and manuscripts donated by private individuals. The Public Record Office moved from its original location in the City of London to the current building in Kew Gardens in 1977, and following the formation of The National Archives, all relevant documents were moved there, aside from a substantial portion kept in offsite storage in a former salt mine in Cheshire. Once the preserve of specialist academic researchers, the National Archives is today hugely popular with amateur historians and genealogists.

Collection

The material available for historians of the Middle East is extensive. A huge variety of manuscripts, correspondence, financial records, printed texts, registers, and memoranda shed light onto British trade, diplomacy, warfare, and colonialism in the Middle East. As well as English-language documents, there are a significant number of items in French, Italian, and Latin. Moreover, there is a collection of generally unexamined documents in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian interspersed amongst the registers, and sometimes separated into different files. Due to the scale and variety of the archive, only the main relevant collections for Middle East researchers will be discussed here.

The classifications to be consulted largely depend on time period and area of research. For mediaevalists, there are around 300 cataloged records relating to the Crusades and early trade with the Middle East and Levant in the Chancery (C), and Special Collection (SC) series, with documents dating from as early as the 1210s.

Records relating to the Ottoman Empire and North Africa begin to appear in significant numbers from the early sixteenth century with the beginnings of a significant trade, and especially after the formal establishment of relations between England and the Ottoman Empire in 1580. Several hundred volumes and loose documents relating to trade and diplomacy between the 1570s and 1770s are held in the State Papers (SP), with diplomatic correspondence in SP97 and mercantile records in SP105 and SP110. These include a number of records in Ottoman Turkish, or their translations in Italian. There are a number of extracted documents relating to this period under the series Extracted Documents (EXT), including maps and original letters from Ottoman sultans to British monarchs. Further records on trade and piracy can be found in the Admiralty collection (ADM). Some references to early political and commercial interests in Iran can also be found in that series.

Administrative reform from the 1780s saw the creation of new government ministries including the Foreign Office. This reform, coinciding with the beginnings of methodical archiving, meant that the number of documents produced and archived increased dramatically from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Documents relating to the Ottoman Empire between 1779 until 1906 are generally held in FO78, comprising an astonishing 5,491 thick volumes of correspondence, intelligence, and administrative documents relating to diplomacy and trade produced and received by the embassy in Istanbul and the consular establishments in the Balkans, Anatolia, the Levant, and North Africa. Some consular establishments have their own separate codes (e.g. Aleppo is FO861). The FO series continues into the post-Ottoman period, covering British diplomatic establishments across the Middle East into the 1970s. For instance, FO141 contains 1,521 volumes of correspondence of the British embassy and consulates in Egypt between 1815 and 1973. It is also in this later period that a large amount of material can be found relating to Iran, following the establishment of formal relations in 1807. The main consular posts have their own codes, although some 734 volumes of general correspondence between 1807 and 1905 can be found in FO60. These series contain a number of Persian documents within the registers.

The records of the Colonial Office (CO) are the main resource for researchers interested in British colonial rule in the Middle East. For instance, CO730 contains 178 volumes relating to the Iraq Mandate, and CO733 comprises 495 volumes concerning the Palestine Mandate. There are a large number of sources on British oil interests in Iran and the Persian Gulf in the Ministry of Power’s series (POWE), as well as in the diplomatic correspondence. Additional sources on colonialism can be found in a whole host of other series, including the Board of Trade (BT) and War Office (WO). The private papers of major and minor colonial officials and administrators are available in paper or on microfilm, such as those of Earl Kitchener (PRO30/57). There are a number of records relating to a number of locally recruited military, police, and colonial forces, from the Macedonian Mule Corps (WO405) to the Aden Police (CO1037).

There are a number of introductory subject guides available on The National Archives website. However, for most academic researchers, learning to use the archive’s catalog effectively is the key to research success.

Research Experience

Catalogs and Searches: The Research and Enquiries Room on the first floor hosts a large number of computer terminals, and also offers free wi-fi. The archive’s new catalog, Discovery, enables a variety of search techniques. As well as simple keyword searches, results can be narrowed down by series code, date, and subject area. The browsing function is very helpful for researchers getting to grips with their series of records.

Although the catalog is remarkably comprehensive, most of the descriptions are rather general, giving little sense of the content, particularly those marked ‘general correspondence’. Some early modern and a smaller number of later series do contain document-by-document descriptions, but these are comparatively few in number.  For those researching more specialised topics, this can mean labor-intensive searching over a large number of records.  For those in search of Arabic or Ottoman Turkish documents, these are often kept in their original setting in the correspondence registers, but on occasion they have been extracted into separate files without any context.

The relative comprehensiveness of the catalog does not necessarily equate to a completeness of records. For instance, there has long been a suspicion that documents relating to atrocities committed by the British or under British supervision in the colonies, including their possessions in the Middle East, have been withheld from the public. This suspicion proved to be well-founded, and in 2013 after a legal challenge, a significant amount of material was released from a secret Foreign Office archive at Hanslope Park, including some relating to Aden, Cyprus, and Palestine. Doubtless there are still more records hidden away.

Digitized Documents: Some 5% of documents in The National Archives have been digitized, and the number is gradually increasing.  Many of the more popular series relating to military or family history are only available in digital format. A significant number of the archive’s microfilmed series have been digitized and are available to download for free, including a number of series of interest for Middle East researchers, such as the records of the Arab Bureau (FO882).

Original Documents: Up to six files may be ordered from an off-site location via The National Archives website. Next-day advanced requests must be submitted by 17:00 the day before the planned visit. In the archives themselves, orders can be made from the computer terminals in the Research and Enquiries Room and in the reading rooms. It is necessary to reserve a seat in order to request documents, and documents will be delivered into a cabinet marked with the seat number.

The majority of research takes place in the first floor reading room, and researchers can select seats in group areas, quiet areas, and light areas for better photography. It is advisable for those intending to take photographs to arrive at the archive at a relatively early hour, as those seats are in great demand. Some older and oversized documents will be delivered to the second floor reading room.

Most orders take less than an hour to be completed, and in practice even in busy periods it can take as little as half an hour between ordering the document and receiving it. Up to twenty-one documents can be ordered per day. For researchers requiring bulk orders, at least two days’ notice is required and the completion of an online form. It is best to discuss this order with staff at the first floor reading room’s help desk before it is placed.

Library: The National Archives Research Library, situated on the first floor, contains some 65,000 volumes on a variety of subjects, and its holdings include works on Middle Eastern history, bibliographies, and subject guides. The catalog can be searched by subject or through keywords.

Help and staff: The National Archives is incredibly user-friendly. There is a ‘Start Here’ desk on the first floor before entering the reading rooms to help orientate new researchers. On the same floor, there are two help desks: a red desk that specializes in military and family history, and the blue desk that offers advice on political, economic, social, and colonial history. There are a number of computer terminals through which the archive’s online and digitized resources can be accessed.

The staff are generally friendly. However, whilst keen to help, the advice they can offer on specialist research is often limited. Security is strict when entering and leaving the reading rooms. This is aimed at ensuring that no documents are removed, and no prohibited items, such as pens, are brought in. Laptops must be opened, and stationary and cables must be kept in clear plastic bags, which may be searched. Inside the reading rooms, security guards make regular patrols to ensure that documents are being handled in an appropriate manner. Guides on how to handle the documents and other rules of the reading room are prominently displayed by the computer terminals and on the desks.

Access

The National Archives is open Tuesdays to Saturdays. The opening hours are between 09:00 and 19:00 on Tuesdays and Thursdays with last document orders at 17:00, and between 09:00 and 17:00 on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, with last document orders at 16:15. The archives are closed on public holidays, full details of which can be found on the website.

It is necessary to have a reader’s ticket to view original documents. To obtain a reader’s ticket, new researchers must go to the registration room on the second floor to fill in an online form, and bring two forms of identification, one that provides proof of name with a signature, and another that shows proof of address. Acceptable forms of documentation are listed on the website. Digitized material and the library collection can be viewed without a reader’s ticket.

All public areas in The National Archives are fully wheelchair accessible. A number of dedicated computer terminals exist for partially sighted researchers.

Reproductions

Researchers can take their own photographs of documents for free, and are encouraged to do so. Flash photography is strictly forbidden. There are a number of seats in the first floor reading room with camera stands. Some kinds of document cannot be photographed, including those that are fragile or non-public records, but this will be made clear on ordering.

Printed copies of microfilm documents can be made for 25p per page. There are a number of machines on the first floor through which cash can be added to the reader’s ticket for such copying, and the staff will help first-timers through the self-service printing process. The archive offers its own paper and digital copying services. Prices vary, and it is necessary to submit a form online to receive a quote. Orders are usually fulfilled in less than two weeks, although this varies depending on the type and quantity of document being ordered.

Transportation, food, and other facilities

The National Archives is situated in Kew Gardens, some ten miles / sixteen kilometers from Central London. The easiest way to access the archives is by the London Underground. The walk from the station to the archives is well signposted, and takes less than ten minutes. Kew Gardens Underground Station is served by the District Line and London Overground. For researchers staying in Central London, the District Line is by far the easier option, and the journey takes around forty-five minutes. The Transport for London Journey Planner is very helpful in planning routes to the archives from anywhere in London.

The archive contains a café and restaurant on the ground floor, which is reasonably priced for the area. Most teas are around £1.50 and coffees over £2. Lunch with soup, a main dish, and desert costs around £10. Vegetarian options are available. There are also are a number of cafés, restaurants, and pubs around the station.

The ground floor also hosts a number of other facilities, including a free cloakroom with lockers. There is an interesting museum that houses a number of archival treasures, as well as a bookshop.

Outside the archive is a large pond frequented by ducks, moorhens, geese, swans, and herons. Outdoor seating is available around the pond, making for very pleasant breaks when the weather permits.

Contact information

Address:

The National Archives

Ruskin Avenue

Kew, Richmond

Surrey

TW9 4DU

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8876 3444

Online: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/contact/

Resources and links

The National Archives home page

Searchable online catalog

Written by Michael Talbot, Teaching Fellow in Ottoman history, University of St. Andrews

Cite this: Michael Talbot, “The National Archives (United Kingdom)”, HAZİNE, 1 November 2013, https://hazine.info/2013/11/01/the-national-archives-united-kingdom/

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Open-access Digitized Archival Materials

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.
Screenshot of Genizah document at Cambridge University Digital Library.

Asnad.org

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.

The Cairo Genizah (Cambridge University)

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 (Greece)

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.

The National Archives (United Kingdom)

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).

The National Archives (United States)

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 State Archives

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.

29 October 2013

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Venetian State Archives Online

The Venetian State Archives (Archivio di Stato di Venezia) has made freely available online one of its most important collections of Ottoman documents. The Venetian State Archives is one of the most important repositories in Europe of archival material related to Ottoman history. While the majority of material related to the Ottoman Empire is only accessible through research on site in Venice, through the auspices of Progetto Divenire, the archive has digitized and made available online a number of its collections, including an important collection of documents concerning relations with the Ottoman Empire (Miscellanea documenti turchi).

Detail of the Ottoman Ahdname of 1050/1641 (n. 1470, Miscellenea documenti turchi).
Detail of the Ottoman Ahdname of 1050/1641 (n. 1470, Miscellenea documenti turchi).

History

The collection now labeled Miscellenea documenti turchi contains some of the most important documents related to the political and diplomatic relations between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire.  While there are other collections within the Venetian Archives which preserve important material pertaining to the relations between these two states, many of the most important imperial letters (name-i hümayun) and treaties (ahdname) issued by Ottoman sultans are preserved among the twenty boxes of documents which comprise Miscellanea documenti turchi. For this reason, many of these documents have been examined and  published by prominent Orientalists and Ottomanists of the twentieth century, including Luigi Bonelli, Lajos Fekete, Alessio Bombaci, M. Tayyıp Gökbilgin, Maria Francesca Tiepolo, and Şerafettin Turan. Beginning in the 1940s, Alessio Bombaci was tasked with organizing and cataloging the collection. Although Bombaci developed an inventory of the collection’s fifteenth- and sixteenth-century holdings, he never produced a formal catalog as the difficulties of carrying out the work in the midst of the Second World War proved too great. In the 1980s, Maria Pia Pedani resumed the work of describing the collection and creating a catalog. This work was published in 1994 in a volume entitled I “Documenti turchi” dell’Archivio di Stato di Venezia. In 2006, the Venetian State Archives, in collaboration with the National Council for Research in Florence (Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche di Firenze), began digitizing this collection through Progetto Divenire. Today all of the documents of the Miscellanea documenti turchi are freely available online.

Collection

The collection contains 2,022 documents related to the Republic of Venice’s relations with the Ottoman Empire between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The collection is ordered chronologically with a small number of undated documents added to the end of the collection’s series. Documents n.1-1997 are ordered chronologically and include material produced between 859/1454 and 1252/1837. The majority of these documents are from the tenth/sixteenth century (n. 73-1117), although the collection has considerable material from the eleventh/seventeenth century as well (n. 1118- 1609).

The range of material varies from elaborately produced imperial documents such as official royal correspondence (name-i hümayun) and treaties (ahdname) to short letters and reports written by provincial Ottoman officials, especially in the Balkans. The documenti turchi includes such important rescripts as Selim I’s victory announcement (fethname) in the wake of the Ottoman capture of Kemah and the defeat of ‘Ala al-dawla Dulgadir in 921/1515 (n. 165) and the peace treaty offered by Selim II in 980/1573 which ended hostilities between the Ottomans and Venetians after the battle of Lepanto and the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus (n. 818). For the seventeenth century, the collection has a large number of documents concerning Crete (n. 1334 contains many documents) as well as the Treaty of Karlowitz together with the Ottoman capitulations with the Republic of Venice (n. 1610, dated 1112/1701). In total, the collection has twenty-one treaties with Venice issued by Ottoman sultans.

While the collection’s material is mostly in Ottoman Turkish, there are a fair number of documents issued in other languages including Greek, Italian, and Arabic. Most of the documents are accompanied with contemporary Italian translations or summaries. Particularly interesting is the fair amount of Ottoman imperial correspondence composed in Greek which bears the sultan’s insignia (tuğra). The creation of Ottoman documents in Greek by the central chancery was a relatively common occurrence in the fifteenth century. This is reflected in the holdings of Miscellanea documenti turchi, where all of the Ottoman documents produced during the reign of Sultan Mehmed II (d. 886/1481) were prepared in Greek. The collection’s last rescript issued by a sultan and composed in Greek is Sultan Süleyman’s victory announcement issued for the Hungarian campaign and siege of Vienna in 935/1529 (n. 250).

The collection includes more quotidian material as well. There are many examples of testimony (hüccet) endorsed by Ottoman provincial judges. Moreover there are several surprising inclusions in the collection. For instance, the last document in the series explains the rules of Persian grammar in Arabic verse (n. 2022).

Research Experience

The collection is available at the archive’s website. While the site is in Italian, its simple and logical layout allows users with little knowledge of Italian to navigate it without too much difficulty. Users may browse the documents in order by clicking on the link to any of the individually numbered documents. More importantly, the archive’s website provides an advanced search option (ricerca avanzata, located in the menu bar). Within the advanced search option, select the collection (documenti turchi) and the search criteria under the heading ‘criteria directory’ (elenco criteri). Search criteria range from name of sender or recipient to document origin, destination, type, date, language, and even physical dimensions. In the box below labeled imposta il contenuto da cercare, you may enter your search term. Make certain to select Miscellanea documenti turchi under the reproduced series field (serie riprodotte) before you request the search (effetua la ricerca). The search engine enables users to enter multiple search terms.

Once you have located a document to view, click on its link. The archive’s website is often slow and as the document files are very detailed, this step may take a few seconds. This will bring up the document’s page. In order to access the catalog information as well as view the digitized document, click on the document link on the right-hand side of the page under the heading schede. In order to view the document in a large format in a separate window, click on the screen icon on the upper right of the document viewer. The catalog information for each document is quite detailed and includes information on the document’s sender, recipient, date, location, as well as a short description of the document’s contents.

The open-access digitization of this important collection is a welcome development in our field. Many libraries and archives around the world are turning to digitization as a way to preserve their collections while also make them available to a wider community of scholars and researchers. In an upcoming post, Nir Shafir will examine the implications of these developments for conducting research.

Catalogs and Useful Resources

Archivio di Stato di Venezia. I “documenti turchi” dell’Archivio di Stato di Venezia: inventario della miscellanea a cura di Maria Pia Pedani Fabris; con l’edizione dei regesti di Alessio Bombaci. Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, Uficio centrale per i beni archivistici, 1994.

Inventory of the lettere e scritture Turchesche in the Venetian State Archives. Edited by Maria Pia Pedani; based on materials compiled by Alessio Bombaci. Ledien; Boston: Brill, 2010.

Miscellanea documenti turchi: The open-access digitized documents of the Miscellenea documenti turchi at the Venetian State Archives

State and Information in the Early Modern Mediterranean: A discussion of information gathering and the development of archives in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean at Ottoman History Podcast

Written by Christopher Markiewicz

24 October 2013

Cite this: Christopher Markiewicz, “Venetian State Archives Online: Miscellenea documenti turchi”, HAZİNE, 24 October 2013. https://hazine.info/2013/10/24/venetian-state-archives-online-miscellenea-documenti-turchi/