Mediterranean History

Interface in English or other, major European languages. Content in multiple languages.
Europe-wide unified search of digitized collections. Images, audio, texts, and more. Funded by the EU. Covers more than 1,000 years of history. Strongest for 1500 to 2000.
Open Access.

Interface in English and French (and other major, European languages). Majority of the content in French.
France's fantastic digital library from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Digitized periodicals, images, recordings, and more. Covers two millenia with particular strength from 1500 to the present.
Open Access.

Interface in English. Content in English or other languages.
Digitized collections from the Library of Congress, includes manuscripts, books, photos, maps, audio recordings, and more. Strongest between the 17th and 21st centuries. Content dating back to B.C.E.
Open Access.

Located in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is one of the most widely used research facilities in the world devoted to preserving materials on the history and culture of peoples of African descent. Provides much useful information pertaining to African-American authors and literature.

Search over 16 million records of museum objects, archives and library materials including more than 5.1 million online images, audio & videos and blog posts.

The World Digital Library is a Library of Congress project sponsored by UNESCO. Items in this digital library, including books, manuscripts, photographs, maps and sound recordings, are individually described and searchable in seven languages. Most countries and regions around the world are represented.

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.

Collection of 1,230 volume is a gold mine for researchers of the late Ottoman and Republican periods of Turkish history. It includes hundreds of Ottoman language works that cover contemporary affairs, history, ethics and government publications.
Interface primarily in Turkish with English mask.

210,000 digitized or born-digital images in the Koç University collections featuring prints, photographs, slides, maps, newspapers, posters, postcards, manuscripts, streaming video, and more. The collections consist of the materials of the Koç University Libraries and Archives (AKMED, ANAMED, SKL, and VEKAM), Koç University Faculty and Departments, and projects carried out in partnership with the Koç University Libraries.

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

The Database of Ottoman Inscriptions (DOI) is searchable digital database comprising information about, as well as transliterations and pictures of, all the Turkish, Arabic and Persian architectural inscriptions created in the Ottoman lands during Ottoman times.

Provides data, a bibliography and more on prices, wages, taxes and currency in the Ottoman Empire

The majority of the documents pertain to the trials, from 1919-1921, against the Committee of Union and Progress members and perpetrators of genocide. The original documents of these materials are either lost or being held in secret by the Turkish government. A second portion of the Ottoman documents was taken from the Boghos Nubar Pasha Library in Paris, including the documents containing the Memoirs of the Ottoman bureaucrat named Naim Efendi and the Talat Pasha telegraphs.

Hein Online collection of country constitutions, constitutional hierarchies , and texts and journals on consitutional law.

This website offers access to the diplomatic reports of Ottoman envoys in Belgium (1849–1914). They are made available here for the first time in high-quality photographic reproduction, together with key information on every dispatch (author, recipient, date, summary).

This collection contains 1,819 photographs in 51 large-format albums date from about 1880 to 1893. They portray the Ottoman Empire during the reign of one of its last sultans, Abdul-Hamid II and highlight the modernization of numerous aspects of the Ottoman Empire.

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 Birzeit University Palestinian Archive Project (BZUPAP) is dedicated to documenting the life of Palestinians (persons, families and organizations) over the past century. Documents (more than 700) collected include the most diverse types of written and audiovisual materials (texts, photographs, videos, recordings). Starts in the Roman period onward.

The Eckstein Albums document a medical survey of maternal and infant health in rural Anatolia from 1935 to 1939, captioned by a German Jewish migrant to Atatürk’s new Republic (E038).The Eckstein Albums offer a unique insight into Turkish medical history and the engagement of Jewish migrants in Atatürk’s health and social reforms.

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

Libraries around the world can with great ease use the FARABİ software, with its strong software build and support, to make available their digital collections, comprising of items such as books, periodicals, maps, postcards and the like, to the public domain and experts in their field of research.

A free and extensive database of references to theses, books, articles, papers and projects relating to research into Ottoman-Turkish culture.

The ISMI database provides a means to access Islamicate authors, their works, and extant manuscript witnesses in the various fields of the mathematical sciences. These fields include the “pure” mathematical sciences (such as geometry, arithmetic, algebra, and trigonometry) as well as the “mixed” mathematical sciences (such as astronomy, optics, music, and mechanics).

Manuscripts of the Muslim World is a digitization project that feature more than 500 manuscripts and 827 paintings from the Islamicate world broadly construed. Together these holdings represent in great breadth the flourishing intellectual and cultural heritage of Muslim lands from 1000 to 1900. The bulk of the collection consists of manuscripts in Arabic and Persian, along with examples of Coptic, Samaritan, Syriac, Turkish, and Berber.

The manuscripts are chiefly in Arabic but also include Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and other languages of the extended Islamic world written in Arabic script. They date from the early centuries of Islam through the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Most of the manuscripts originated in Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and other main centers of Islamic civilization. Subject coverage is broad and comprehensive, including theology based both on Qur’ān and tradition (hadīth); Islamic law (fiqh); history and biography (especially of the Prophet and other religious leaders); book arts and illustration; language and literature; science; magic, and the occult; and other aspects of the intellectual and spiritual life of the Islamic world and its diverse peoples.

44 maps help by the Library of Congress' featuring the Ottoman Empire or Turkey.

The bulk of the collection contains topographical maps compiled at the British Intelligence Division War Office in 1915 derived from map and survey data collected during multiple expeditions 1839-1906.

Interface in English, material in diverse languages.
More than a dozen digital facsimiles of maps of different parts of the Ottoman Empire.

82 Titles, date range: 1908-1948, 156,287 pages, 24,376 issues. [National Library of Israel]

1. Akşam (1929-1964) 2. Cumhuriyet (1929-1950) 3. Gaye-i Milliye (1921) 4. Hakimiyet-i Milliye (1916-1928) 5. İkdam Gazetesi (1889-1915) 6. Peyam Gazetesi (1913-1914) 7. Servet Gazetesi (1890-1904) 8. Servet-i Fünun (1889-1928) 9. Takvim-i Vekayi (1841-1919) 10. Tanin Gazetesi (1908-1912) 11. Tarik Gazetesi (1886-1892) 12. Tercüman-ı Hakikat (1879-1922) 13. Ulus Gazetesi (1935-1937) 14. Vatan Gazetesi (1941) 15. Yeni İstanbul (1949-1950) 16. Yeni Sabah (1939-1950) 17. Zafer (1949-1950) 18. Zaman (1934-1935)

Digital archive of Ottoman periodicals from the Hakkı Tarık Us Collection, Beyazıt State Library, Istanbul.

HOE is a collection of meta-data focusing on historiographical writing of Early Modern Ottoman Europe (1500-1800). It brings together published and unpublished primary sources (chronicles, histories, hagiographies, inscriptions, maps…), as well as secondary material (“Main Section”). [Ruhr Universität Bochum]

"This project, a collaboration between İstanbul Atatürk Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes, aims to digitize newspapers and magazines published in French from the second half of the 19th century to the 1930s. More than a hundred titles, including periodicals printed in the Ottoman Empire as well as media published by the Young Turks of Europe, are now accessible. İstanbul Atatürk Library’s collection of Franco-Ottoman press has been digitalized by SALT Research, while the collection of Bibliothèque Nationale de France can be accessed through Gallica."

Reveal almost a century of profound transformations in Turkey; they cover the Tanzimat – the mid-19th-century Ottoman reform movement – and span to the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, and the raise of Atatürk and his social and cultural reforms. The collection comprises about 500 titles on a wide range of topics – from literary works to historical and political treatises. Most of the books in the collection are printed editions in Ottoman Turkish, although it includes some manuscripts and early published titles in Modern Turkish too.

HOE is a collection of meta-data focusing on historiographical writing of Early Modern Ottoman Europe (1500-1800). It brings together published and unpublished primary sources (chronicles, histories, hagiographies, inscriptions, maps…), as well as secondary material (“Main Section”). [Ruhr Universität Bochum]

This is a database of articles on Islamic Studies published in the circles of Theology Faculties in Turkey. Once you click on "arama sayfasi" on the upper right corner, you get to the database search page. I just tried the keyword "osmanli" [with an I, though, that is an "i" without a dot] and got 183 entries for many of which the database includes a pdf copy of the relevant article (the announcement page states that they have 15,000 entries and 11,500 pdf documents).

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).

Interface in English; content in several European languages.
Accounts of travel are a popular and accessible source for research on historical relations between “East” and “West” and are attractive for specialists and non-specialists alike. In the pre-modern period a large number of such accounts were published all over Europe. Predominantly covering the Ottoman Empire, the collection also stretches into Ethiopia, Central Asia, Afghanistan, North Africa, and of course Iran.
BC Institutional login necessary.

Interface and material predominately in English.
Contains roughly 1000 brochures, booklets, leaflets, flyers, and off-prints that date from the mid-1800s to the present, with close to one-third from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Approximately 85% of the materials focus on the operations, institutions, or affiliate organizations of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) that were located in Turkey and the Balkans.
Open Access.