International Digital Collections and Projects

This monumental collection portrays the Ottoman Empire during the reign of one of its last sultans, Abdul-Hamid II. The 1,819 photographs in 51 large-format albums date from about 1880 to 1893.

The University of Nebraska-Omaha Criss Library holds the Arthur Paul Afghanistan Collection, one of the largest collections of Afghan primary and secondary materials outside of the country. It contains over 20,000 titles in more than 20 languages, including Persian, Dari, Pashto, and English.

The Afghanistan Digital Library is a service offered by the NYU libraries and is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Reed Foundation and the W.L.S. Spencer Foundation. It retrieves and restores works published in Afghanistan between 1870 and 1930; the long-term objective is to collect, catalogue, digitize and provide access to as many of this period's publications as possible.

AMIR (Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources) is a collaborative project founded in 2010, which provides information on public domain materials on Near Eastern Studies and Islam. An up-to-date inventory list of public access online journals as well as of current digitization projects is planned. AMIR makes use of AWOL (The Ancient World Online), a blogger project run by the Pattee library of Penn State University.

Arabic Collections Online (ACO) is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. Its aim is to digitize, preserve, and provide free open access to a wide variety of Arabic language books in subjects such as literature, philosophy, law, religion etc. Established with support from NYU Abu Dhabi, contributing partners are New York University, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, American University in Cairo, American University of Beirut and United Arab Emirates National Archives.

Since 2000, Duke University Libraries have been building and expanding their Middle East and Islamic Studies collection. While collecting comprehensively in all subject areas in English, the collections in the three main regional languages, Arabic, Persian, modern Turkish/Ottoman Turkish, as well as Urdu, (for Hebrew, see the collection description on the Jewish Studies guide) center on the humanities and social sciences, with a particular focus on materials on Islam (jurisprudence, law, exegesis, theology), Arabic language (grammar) and literature (both classical and modern), as well as history (history of Islam, contemporary history) and politics.

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world.
The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) was founded by the HathiTrust Digital Library, Indiana University and the University of Illinois.

The nonprofit, San Francisco based Internet Archive project was founded in 1996 with the objective of establishing a comprehensive “Internet Library“. It offers digital access to books and texts as well as audio- and video files in various collections. Arabic and Persian works can be found in the section Community Texts.

Through the Islamic Heritage Project (IHP) the Harvard University Open Collections Program in cooperation with the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program has cataloged, conserved, and digitized hundreds of Islamic manuscripts, maps, and texts from Harvard’s renowned library and museum collections. These rare—and frequently unique—materials are now freely available to Internet users worldwide.

An online platform by the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies of the North Carolina State University. A collection of materials relating to Libanon is offered, like newspapers and journals, but also photographs, books and other documents. These can be researched in different categories or by using key words. Searching for Arabic terms is also partially possible.

The Middle Eastern & North African Newspapers collection offers digitized publications of the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, from the Ottoman Empire to the Arab Spring, providing unique insights into the history of individual countries, as well as broad viewpoints on key historic events from the late nineteenth century through the present. Key topics include the decline of colonialism, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Suez Crisis, the Cold War, the rise of the petroleum industry, twentieth-century pan-Arab movements, both World Wars, the establishment of the state of Israel, the Iran-Iraq War, and the recent Arab Spring.

Through Access Archival Databases, the National Archives (US) has made available online transcriptions of a number of collections, some of which will be of interest to historians of post-1945 Middle East.

OACIS (Online Access to Consolidated Information on Serials) is operated by Yale University and offers access to Middle Eastern periodicals located in libraries in the US, Europe and the Middle East. Since May 2014, they cooperate with the American University of Beirut.

Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran explores the lives of women during the Qajar era (1796-1925) through a wide array of materials from private family holdings and participating institutions. The collection offers access to thousands of personal papers, manuscripts, photographs, publications, everyday objects, works of art and audio materials, making it a unique online resource for social and cultural histories of the Qajar world. More than 290 periodicals are accessible online.

The World Digital Library (WDL), a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, is an international library which is supported by the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) and comprises cooperation with libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations from around the world. The WDL offers primary materials from all over the world free of charge and in different lingual format. The key objectives of the WDL are the promotion of international and intercultural understanding and the expansion of the variety of cultural content on the internet. In addition WDL aims to provide resources for schorlarly research and to narrow the digital divide between the countries.

An online archive searchable by titles of publications and articles, which includes online journals from the late 19th and early 20th centuries from a variety of geographies across the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. The publications are in part incomplete and not downloadable.

The AUB University Archives collects, organizes, preserves, and provides access to unique, historic, and rare primary sources that document the history and culture of the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, the Arab World, and the region at large. The collections include more than 1,800 manuscripts, 35,000 rare books, 10,000 volumes of AUB theses, projects, and dissertations; 10,000 periodicals, 11,500 posters, 1,200 postcards, 2,000 maps, 100,000 photographs and 1,200 linear feet of archival material, including papers of famous intellectuals, journalists, musicians, artists, and politicians.

The AUC Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library at the American University in Cairo supports research and teaching in the arts, culture, and society of Egypt and the Middle East by providing online access to unique cultural heritage resources. It offers resources from the University Archives, Rare and Special Books, Archives and Manuscripts Collections, Oral History Interviews, Regional Architecture Collections, Photography Collections, as well as periodicals.

Since 2010, the Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc digitalizes its body of literature and offers public online access under Bibliothèque Numérique Marocaine. The site most notably features monographs, journals and audio-visual documents, aiming at protecting documents related to Morocco and its culture. Over 2.000.000 pages have been digitalized so far.

The Directory of Free Arab Journals (دليل العوريات العربية المجانية) is a free database for all Arabic journals that have been published by Arabic universities or reasearch institutes. There is no focus on any specific field, however the website is restricted to non-profit publishers. Via an enhanced search function, journals can be searched by specific areas to then via link be accessed at their institution of publishing. Currently (by June 2017) there are 250 journals from 17 countries by 172 publishers available on the website. The website is updated every 4 months and entirely in Arabic, though an English interface is in process.

This website tranfers Mohamed Ali Eltaher's heritage from manuscript and paper format to digital media and provides the sources and references needed for those who are interested to learn more about him, and, more importantly to learn about the history of the Near East and North Africa between 1912 and 1974. The online archive offers first-hand original material, like several books and many articles and interviews appearing in several newspapers and periodicals in the Arab world, as well as documents and photographs.

Al-Hakawati is an independent non-profit educational organization. Management and staff are located in Beirut, Lebanon, and New Jersey, USA. Al-Hakawati offers a digital public library of Arab and Islamic culture, whereby the content covers the 22 Arab states, members of the Arab League. The content is arranged thematically in ten sections, each with several subsections. New entries are regularly added.

The Qatar Digital Library (QDL) offers a vast archive featuring the cultural and historical heritage of the Gulf and wider region freely available online. It includes archives, maps, manuscripts, sound recordings, photographs and much more. Moreover QDL completes those archives with contextualised explanatory notes and links, in both English and Arabic.
The QDL has been developed as part of a 10-year Memorandum of Understanding on Partnerships between the Qatar Foundation, the Qatar National Library and The British Library.

The Chester Beatty is the pre-eminent Irish museum promoting the appreciation and understanding of world cultures with holdings of manuscripts, rare books, and other treasures from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. An engaging and welcoming space, visitors from Ireland and overseas will find permanent and temporary displays, an intercultural learning programme and a broad variety of public activities for all ages and backgrounds. The Digital Collections of the museum offers, among others, an Arabic, Persian and Turkish Collection.

The British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme comprises different projects for the preservation and protection of endangered documents. Project 119 makes accessible and digitalizes the periodicals dating from around 1900 kept in the al-Aqsa Mosque library in Eastern Jerusalem – as of now, about 25 periodicals and newspapers are digitally accessible.

The Europeana Newspapers project, funded under the European Commission’s CIP 2007 – 2013 programme, digitized 10 million newspaper pages to full text. This helps users quickly search for specific articles, people and locations mentioned within the the newspapers.

The Union Catalogue of Manuscripts from the Islamicate World is a free on-line catalogue for manuscript descriptions. The rich collections of manuscripts bear witness to the linguistic, religious and cultural diversity of what commonly features as the Islamic world. The combined holdings of the contributing Libraries of the UK are of considerable intellectual and cultural significance. All participating libraries have been selectively collecting manuscripts from all subject areas, and of various geographical origins, dating from the 7th to the 19th century CE. FIHRIST is not a digital Library, if a digital copy of a works exists on-line, a link is provided and maintained by the institution holding the manuscript.

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 Global Journals Portal offers different non-European and/or diasporic critical and cultural periodicals, published in the aftermaths of the revolutionary movements at the end of the 18th century to the end of the two blocs world in 1989. The website has been developed within the framework of the "Global art and cultural periodicals" program of the "Global History of Art" research area at the National Institute for History of Art (INHA) in Paris.

This project involves the conversion of the University's photographic archives of Middle Eastern art and archaeology into a modern digital resource. Of central importance to this project is the development of a tailor-made database to allow for the storage and delivery of the tens of thousands of images which make up the archives.

Nashriyah: digital Iranian history (آرشیو آنلاین نشریات دانشگاه منچستر ) is a project by the University of Manchester. Their aim is to give free access to Iranian newspapers and journals in a digitized form to those who are interested in them. The main focus is periodicals, that were published in the time of the social and political upheavel from the rule of the Shah to the Islamic Republic and give insight into historical events like the Coup d’État in 1953 against Mohammad Mossadegh or the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Currently there are 23 periodicals in digitized form.

This project is a collaboration between Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Atatürk Library, Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes (IFEA), and Bibliothèque nationale de France. Dating from the second half of the 19th century to the 1930s, the collection provides access to the periodicals published in French in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic, as well as the Young Turks’ various publications in Europe. Atatürk Library’s collection of Franco-Ottoman press was digitized by SALT Research. The related collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France is available through Gallica

Digital collection of Ankara University comprising various Ottoman periodicals held by the Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi (Faculty of Political Science) and the Milli Kütüphane (National Library).

The Hakkı Tarık Us Collection, named after the author and politician Hakkı Tarık Us (1889-1956), was founded in 2003 and is owned by the Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi (Beyazıt State Library) in İstanbul. It is a cooperation project between the library, the Centre for Documentation and Area-Transcultural Studies of the Tōkyō Gaikokugo Daigaku (Tokyo Foreign Language University) and the Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı (Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism). This collection contains, among other things, a digital archive of Ottoman periodicals, including magazines and newspapers, which have been restored, classified and registered there.
Until 2007, the project was called "Project for Preservation and Digitisation of Periodicals in the Hakkı Tarık Us Collection". Between 2009 and 2010, it was continued and completed under the name "Research and Educational Project of the Middle East and Islamic Studies".

Access to various (digital) databases via the İslâm Araştırmaları Merkezi (İSAM, Centre for Islamic Studies) of the Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (TDV, Diyanet Foundation Turkey), for example Ottoman articles (osmanlica makeleler).

An online platform that makes Ottoman newspapers available in digital form. In addition to the possibility of searching for individual terms within the stock available on the website, issues can also be selected using a calendar. Furthermore, various tools are provided for working with newspapers written in Ottoman Turkish, such as a date calculator for converting the Miladi, Hijri and Gregorian calendars, an overview statistic of journal and newspaper holdings, as well as an Ottoman Turkish online dictionary created by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Kanar. The site is entirely in Turkish.

The Süreli Yayınlar Bilgi Sistemi (Periodicals Information System) is a database of the Türkiye Milli Kütüphane (National Library of Turkey) that provides access to newspapers and magazines of various periodicity. The partner is the Europeana Newspapers project.

Asnad.org is a research project of the Chair of Iranian Studies at the University of Bamberg (Germany). It offers a database of Persian Historical Documents from Iran and Central Asia up to the 20th Century which includes "public" and "private" documents: royal decrees and orders, official correspondence, and shari'a court documents, such as contracts of sale and lease, vaqf deeds, marriage contracts, and court orders. It also serves as a bibliographic reference tool, being a continually updated repertoire of published historical documents.

Bridging the gap is a project of Utrecht University that seeks to harness Digital Humanities approaches and technologies to make pioneering forays into the vast corpus of digitized Arabic texts as well as developing a web-based application.

The Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) of the British Library facilitates the digitization of archives that contain thousands of newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts and photographs from around the world that are in danger of destruction, neglect or physical deterioration. Especially from countries where their persistence can’t be guaranteed.

The Europeana Newspapers project, funded under the European Commission’s CIP 2007 – 2013 programme, digitized 10 million newspaper pages to full text. This helps users quickly search for specific articles, people and locations mentioned within the the newspapers.

The project Jara'id, funded by the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), provides a chronology of nineteenth-century periodicals in Arabic (1800-1900). The core data are offered in a table containing information on titles, dates of first and last issue published, place(s) of publication, names of publishers and editors, language(s) of publication, and available collections.

This project involves the conversion of the University's photographic archives of Middle Eastern art and archaeology into a modern digital resource. Of central importance to this project is the development of a tailor-made database to allow for the storage and delivery of the tens of thousands of images which make up the archives.

Uskudar kültür-sanat gives an overview of women journals and journalism in the Ottoman period.

Vezvez-e kandū is a research database for Iranian studies to find literature, sources and more. The digital toolbox collects literature and media, search engines, catalogs, databases and bibliographies, encyclopedias, publication platforms, digital archives and full-text repositories, dissertations and theses, and scholarly reviews.

AMIR (Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources) is a collaborative project founded in 2010, which provides information on public domain materials on Near Eastern Studies and Islam. An up-to-date inventory list of public access online journals as well as of current digitization projects is planned. AMIR makes use of AWOL (The Ancient World Online), a blogger project run by the Pattee library of Penn State University.

This project of the UCLA Library presents collections with content from Armenia, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, and South Africa ranging from fragile early 20th century newspapers to posters, postcards, cellphone videos, and much more. These collections represent significant content that was used during political movements, but that is ephemeral in nature and likely to be lost without proactive curation.