Mediterranean History

Virtual public library of Arab and Islamic heritage. The purpose is to make learning and knowledge about the Arab world easily available, and to promote understanding of Arab/Islamic culture in the Arabic speaking work and in the West.

The ACOR in Amman, Jordan is in the process of digitizing a photographic archive related to its role in preserving and promoting the country’s heritage.

CRL has partnered with the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) to develop the Digital Library for International Research. DLIR provides bibliographic and full-text access to print collections and other media held at CAORC-sponsored overseas research centers and allied partners in Europe; the Near and Middle East; Inner, South, and Southeast Asia; North and West Africa; and the New World.

CLIR is working with the Qatar National Library, The Antiquities Coalition, the Digital Library Federation (DLF), Stanford University Libraries and other institutions worldwide to explore the feasibility and undertake technical prototyping of a Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME).

Interface and content in English.
This collection includes the text of hundreds of excellent sources spanning from antiquity to the present. The have particularly robust collections in African, East Asian, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, the history of science, women's history, and a growing "global" set.
Open Access.

MENALIB is a portal for the Fachinformationsdienstes Nahost-, Nordafrika- und Islamstudien (FID). Interface in German with English translation. Provides access to thousands of documents with relevance to MENA history.

The Orient-Institut Istanbul’s library is a scientific research library with an emphasis on the study of the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey in all aspects (linguistical, historical, literature and social sciences) and of the Turkic languages and literatures of Central Asia.

The Qantara project, which is part of the Euromed Heritage program, is an excellent resource for the history, culture, geography, and art of the Mediterranean nations. The astrolabe video is a particularly good resource.

Search more than 40,000 images in one of the world's largest archives specializing in historic and current images of the Middle East and the Islamic world. Most of the images on line are published and unpublished images from the bimonthly magazine Aramco World, from 1964 to 2000, and Saudi Aramco World, to the present.

More than 2,000 digital facsimiles of maps, government documents and newspapers; postcards, illustrations, and photographs; and more.

More than 600 digital facsimiles of photographs and documents from 1820 to 2004 related to culture, technology, and oil in the Arabian Gulf.

The Malek National Library in Tehran, Iran provides digital facsimiles of manuscripts as well as ephemera such as textiles, ceramics, glass and metal objects, lacquer arts and paintings, stamps and miniatures, and more. Texts mostly in Farsi.

Includes facsimiles of books, oral history, photographs and more.

Catalog of the National Library of Tunisia, this includes old Tunisian newspapers & other periodicals. Digitized documents may be available. In French.

More than 4,000 images of buildings, paintings, landscapes, fashion and jewelry, map and charts, and more from 1750 to the present.

A forum for serious scholars to post their carefully documented photographs, plans, and assessments of the Christian architecture in the Levant.

No longer updated, this is an excellent access point for multiple DH projects related to Islamic History.

This project features Miniature paintings from the estate of Mrs. Adrienne Minassian. The paintings often include text from Persian and Indian tales. Many of the illustrations within the Minassian Collection are depictions of stories from the classical Persian text, Shahnama of Ferdowsi.

Arabic Collections Online is a digital library of public domain Arabic language content. Funded by New York University Abu Dhabi, this mass digitization project aims to expose up to 15,000 volumes from NYU and partner institutions over a period of five years. NYU and the partner institutions are contributing all types of material—literature, business, science, and more—from their Arabic language collections. ACO will provide digital access to printed books drawn from rich Arabic collections of prominent libraries.

Includes multiple serial novels from at least 150 newspaper and magazines that were published in Arabic based alphabet in the period 1831-1928.

The archive consists at present of over 33,000 images, including prints, negatives and slides drawn from around the Middle East and North Africa starting in the 1850s, of which over 10,000 are currently available online.

The online platform of The Arab Image Foundation, Beirut’s non-profit archive of Middle Eastern photography, makes 22,000 images from the collection (so far) accessible and searchable. By registering an account, you can download the images as PDF files for non-commercial use.

In 1924 Mrs. Howard Bliss presented to the Library of the University a collection of photographs on the Middle East mainly, with a few on Europe. She named it "E.W. Blatchford Collection" after her father's name Eliphalet Wickes Blatchford (for details see following page on Donors of Collection) who, with her mother, had collected these photographs during their travels.

Visual record of the late years of the Ottoman Empire and the formation and early years of the Republic of Turkey. The collection focuses on cultural and urban images, mainly of Constantinople (Istanbul), the capital of the Ottoman Empire, but other geographic areas, such as the Balkans, and other cities and towns within the empire such as Bursa and Smyrna (İzmir) are included, as are a few images from places such as Greece, Egypt, Jerusalem, India and China.

The digital collection ranges to the turn of the last century when entrepreneurial photographers and publishers mass-produced handsome mounted photographs, custom albums, and elegant photo-mechanically printed books for the tourist.

The Middle East Photograph Archive consists of about 400 photographs, most dating to the second half of the nineteenth century and produced by professional photographers. The images depict the monuments of the Middle East's medieval and ancient past as well as scenes of daily life in urban and rural locations.

An ongoing process, this growing collection currently includes more than 1500 digitized images of decorative arts (bowls, statuettes, etc.) as well as manuscripts from the Sasanian period (3-7th c.) to the 17th c.

Information on Digital Humanities (DH) relating to the study of Islamic history and Arabic language texts. No longer updated.

Online community of architects, planners, urban designers, and scholars, focused on Muslim cultures and civilizations.

Suggestions for some of the best sites for finding credited visual resources for Islamic, Middle Eastern and North African Studies.

Scholars with posts on the state of research and news. Content includes information on history as well as contemporary issues across the Middle East.

* Article Database in Ottoman Language / Center for Islamic Studies (İSAM), Istanbul. A database of articles on Turkish history, literature, culture, and art, which includes the bibliographical identification of 52,500 articles and actual digital copies (in pdf).

Network focused on disaster response and recovery, social inclusion and peace, and development in a number of areas, such as health care and food security.

The whole database is available for online viewing; however users will need a login and password to be able to download the original file formats to their computer.

Includes key OECD publications such as: Financial Market Trends, Higher Education Management and Policy, Nuclear Law Bulletin, OECD Economic Outlook, OECD Economic Studies, OECD Economic Surveys, OECD Journal of Competition Law & Policy, and OECD Papers. Cover from 1990s onward.

ODS is the UN's Official Document System. You can search for UN documents by keywords, then narrow your search.

Facsimiles of 18 travel books of the late 19th and 20th centuries focused particularly on Syria and Palestine in English, French, and Arabic.

More than 30 texts from the 17th to the 20th centuries on the subject of travel. Additional searches will return ephemera. Some documents in English.

A digital archive that focuses on Western interactions with the Middle East, particularly travels to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Volume tours the Holy Land as it was known, geographically, both in Biblical times and at the end of the 17th century. The illustrated text describes many sites of Biblical significance, starting with Damascus and ending with the grave of Mary.