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Middle East and Islamic Studies Library Resources

A guide designed for graduate students and researchers.

Library Catalogs & Digital Collections

For library catalogs and digital collections, 

@ Harvard start with the HOLLIS catalog and continue with these additional resources....

@ Library Catalogs ( beyond Harvard)

@ Digital Collections  ( beyond Harvard)

"Digital Libraries and Text Collections".

@ Library Catalogs ( beyond Harvard)

To find and get books beyond Harvard:

Arabic Discovery Catalog: The Arabic Discovery Catalog is one of the most comprehensive bibliographic databases of Arabic culture. It currently holds more than 1.4 million records in Arabic and more than 2.8 million records containing Arabic script and continues to grow. The search box supports searches in Arabic script and delivers precise search results in an Arabic interface. If you are looking for a resource from an Arabic country, in Arabic script, or related to Arabic culture, you are in the right place. You can filter for printed works as well as all types of electronic resources, and open-access content too.

Archives Portal Europe: provides access to information on archival material from different European countries as well as information on archival institutions throughout the continent. The site provides a single interface searching across archival collections of national and regional archives throughout Europe. The directory enables researchers to verify contact details and services offered by institutions in preparation for an on-site visit.

European History Primary Sources (EHPS): this is a joint initiative of the European University Institute Library and the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. It is also part of the WWW Virtual Library History Central Catalogue that is hosted at the EUI. The purpose of EHPS is to provide an easily searchable index of scholarly digital repositories that contain primary sources for the history of Europe and other regions of the world. While not claiming to be complete, EHPS contains the major national digital libraries and many smaller series of e-sources and smaller digitization projects in Europe. It thus reflects to a considerable extent the current state of digitization of historical source materials in Europe, as well as those digitized outside Europe pertaining to its history

Borrow Direct: Borrow Direct lets Harvard University researchers with library borrowing privileges and active e-mail accounts find and borrow books directly from the libraries of Brown, University of Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Johns Hopkins, MIT, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. The link takes you to the Borrow Direct online system and you'll be asked to enter your Harvard Key.  

Center for Research Libraries: The Middle East Materials Project (MEMP): collections in digital and microform format of unique, rare, hard to obtain, and often expensive research material for Middle East studies; for detailed information about the collections follow this link

Gallica, La Bibliothèque Nationale de France:  Digital collections of books and images in the French National Library.

Gazi Husrev-bey Library, The Gazi-Husrev-beg Library is a public library in SarajevoBosnia and Herzegovina founded in 1537, and is part of a larger complex with Gazi Husrev-beg Medresa. It holds one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, including many originally donated by Gazi Husrev-beg. The collection survived through Bosnian war and Siege of Sarajevo. The library also holds a sizable number of books, journals, newspapers, documents and photographs. (wikipedia_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazi_Husrev-beg_Library). Harvard Library has volumes 1-18 of the Catalogue of the Arabic, Turkish, Persian & Bosnian manuscripts in the Ghazi Husrev-Bey Library, Sarajevo.  (Hollis Record - Here)

Google Books: lets you search the full text of all books available in Google Book Search with a Find at Harvard University link displayed on every item in a search result set. Clicking the link brings the user to the catalog record if an exact match is found in HOLLIS. If an electronic version of the book has been licensed by Harvard, the user will be taken directly to the full text of the e-book. If an exact match in HOLLIS is not found, a pre-populated HOLLIS search screen will open making it easy for patrons to launch a HOLLIS search session.

Hathi Trust: a shared repository of works digitized by more than 50 research library members across the United States, Canada, and Europe. As of 2015 HathiTrust comprised over 13.7 million volumes, including 5.3 million of which were in the public domain in the U.S. Public domain titles may be viewed in full text

al-Maktabah al-Waqfiyah: e-books available through the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive: a digital library of "Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form." Their Wayback Machine allows you to search archived Web pages from 1996 to the present (excluding the most recent 6 months). The site contains a collection of moving images, including feature films, audio resources from various sources, and a collection of electronic texts.

Middle East in Microform: a Union list of Middle Eastern Microforms in North American libraries

Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume du Maroc catalog of manuscripts in the National Library of Morocco.

The Qatar Digital Library: 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 more, with explanatory notes and links, in both English and Arabic. Developed through a partnership among the Qatar Foundation, the Qatar National Library and The British Library

Shamela Library (al-Maktabah al-Shāmilah): a large (6,000 volumes+), free digital collection of Arabic books online, useful to researchers studying pre-modern Middle Eastern history or modern Islamic thought

ULB Sachsen-Anhalt Middle East and North Africa Special Area Collection – Digital: the University and State Library Saxony-Anhalt in Halle (ULB Halle) has digitized over 3050 volumes of Titles belonging to the Middle East and North Africa Special Area Collection (Sondersammelgebiet 6.23); the selected titles for digitization are free of copyright restrictions. They belong to the old holdings of the Library of the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft). A part of the selected titles are more recent publications that are digitized with special permissions of the publishers.

University of Cambridge Online Manuscript Collections and Catalogues: the Near and Middle Eastern manuscripts collection covers a wide range of texts in Arabic (over 2500 codices), Hebrew (over 1000), Persian (over 1200), Syriac (around 300) and Turkish (around 450). There are also smaller collections in Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian, Malay, Urdu and languages of Ancient Egypt.

WorldCat (FirstSearch) and the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (KVK) are large online catalogs in which you can search simultaneously the holdings of many major libraries (WorldCat is mainly for US/Canadian libraries, while Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog searches libraries in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Spain, and the UK).

@ Digital Collections (beyond Harvard)

Here's a selection of eBooks and eCollections available through the Harvard Library for Islamic studies research:

Open Access Digital Archives

Open Access digitized manuscripts

Arabic Collections Online = al-Majmuat al-Arabiyah Ala al-Intinit: a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. ACO currently provides digital access to 5675 volumes across 3779 subjects drawn from rich Arabic collections of distinguished research libraries. Supported by New York University in Abu Dhabi, this mass digitization project aims to feature up to 25,000 volumes from the library collections of NYU and partner institutions

Arabic Literature in the Post-Classical Period : edited by Roger Allen and D.S. Richards. 1st ed.  Cambridge, UK; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Afghanistan and the US, 1945-1963 : Records of US State Department Classified Files: covering 1945 to 1963, this collection accesses U.S. State Department Central Classified Files relating to Afghanistan, including 9,674 images of documents from U.S. diplomats, such as: special reports on political and military affairs, studies and statistics on socioeconomic matters, interviews and minutes of meetings with foreign government officials, court proceedings and other legal documents, full texts of important letters, instructions, and cables sent and received by U.S. diplomatic personnel, reports and translations from foreign journals and newspapers, translations of high-level foreign government documents, including speeches, memoranda, official reports, and transcripts of political meetings and assemblies. The collection is arranged topically and chronologically.

Associated Press 4: Middle Eastern Bureaus Collection, 1967-2008: accesses records from some of the AP's most active international bureaus, delivering exclusive stories behind the headlines from 1967 to 2005 with stories stemming from Jerusalem, Ankara, Beirut and their surrounding areas; records include news stories in the form of typescript carbons or wire copy, the version that AP sent on to its member newspapers, which members were free to alter; most-covered topics include military operations, civil and global wars, diplomacy, refugees, cultural clashes, and terrorism, with real-time insights into the second half of the twentieth century regarding issues of global importance.

Classic Arabic Texts Online: approximately 19,000 pages of classic Brill editions of Arabic texts in a full-text searchable format, accessible from a single point of entry. Includes the following titles: Bibliotheca Geographorum Arabicorum (with indices and glossaries) edited by M.J. de Goeje and J.H. Kramers; De Goeje’s edition of al-Ṭabarī’s Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa l-mulūk; De Goeje’s edition of al-Balādhūrī’s Kitāb Futūḥ al-buldān; and Origins of the Islamic State by Murgotten and Hitti, the English translation of al-Balādhūrī’s Kitāb Futūḥ al-buldān

Early Arabic Printed Books From the British Library: Religion & Law: Part 1 (1514-1899) is a full-text searchable digital library of early printed books in Arabic script covering religious literature and law, and including European translations of Arabic works and Arabic translations of European books

Early Western Korans Online: Koran Printing in the West, 1537-1857: contains all Arabic Koran editions printed in Europe between 1537 and 1857, as well as translations directly from the Arabic (until about 1860). Korans and Koran translations in eight languages are included. Among the secondary translations, only those into German and Dutch are offered completely.

Kotobarabia E-Library: a collection of Arabic e-books including many types of publications [banned literature, fiction, non-fiction (scholarly and popular)] written by Arab authors. Content is primarily in Arabic with metadata in both Arabic and English and the bilingual Arabic/English search interface includes a virtual Arabic keyboard fro easy text input.

Leiden Armenian Lexical Textbase: corpus of fundamental texts (morphologically analyzed, hyperlinked, aligned, etc.) of classical Armenian -- Biblical, historical, literary, lexical -- some with corresponding ancient Greek material

Leuven Database of Ancient Books (LDAB): attempts to collect the basic information on all ancient literary texts, as opposed to documents. Includes 14,000+ items, dating from the fourth century B.C. to A.D. 800 and incorporating authors from Homer (8th cent. B.C.) to Romanus Melodus and Gregorius the Great (6th cent. A.D.), including 3671 texts of which the author can no longer be identified. Here the user will find the oldest preserved copies of each text. At the same time the user will get a view of the reception of ancient literature throughout the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine period: which author was read when, where and by whom throughout Antiquity.

Relational Syllogisms and the History of Arabic Logic, 900-1900: relational inferences are a well-known problem for Aristotelian logic. This book charts the development of thinking about this problem by logicians writing in Arabic from the ninth to the nineteenth century. It shows that that the development of Arabic logic did not -- as is often supposed -- come to an end in the fourteenth century.

Unity in Diversity, Mysticism, Messianism and the Construction of Religious Authority in Islam: this book focuses on a significant, though still largely under-studied, aspect of the role of mystical and messianic ferment in the construction and re-construction of religious authority in Islam