Skip to Main Content
General Resources
- Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) was developed by an engineering team from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and Stanford Libraries, and brings together digitized collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions.
- American University in Cairo, Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library assembles resources from the University Archives, Rare and Special Books, Oral History Interviews, Regional Architecture and Photography Collections, and includes digital and digitized newspapers, magazines, books, manuscripts, videos, photographs, architectural drawings etc.
- American University of Beirut Libraries, Digital Collections gathers manuscripts, maps, photos, posters, books, multimedia and other resources from Lebanon and the region, and includes Palestinian Oral History Archive, early women's magazines and the entire run of al-Ādāb magazine (1953-2012).
- Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library (AMEEL) holds approximately 350,000 pages of full text, indexed and searchable in the language of publication, including Arabic and Western scripts. Comprises journals, Syrian and Palestinan Gazettes, historical manuscripts from Bodleian, British Museum, Leiden, Tübingen, Princeton and Yale, as well as al-Qamus al-Muhit (الـقـامـوس الـمـحـيـط).
- MENALIB - The Middle East Virtual Library is a German/English web portal that provides access to thousands of e-books, e-journals, manuscripts, and other resources from more than a dozen German universities. Links to many other free and Open Access resources on the web are also provided.
Primary Sources
- Arabian Gulf Digital Archives (AGDA) - الأرشيف الرقمي للخليج العربي developed by The National Library and Archives of the United Arab Emirates, showcases digital material that spans two centuries, documenting events and personalities that have shaped and defined the region. The contents offer an insight into the past with some material previously unseen by the general public.
- Qatar Digital Library (QDL) - مكتبة قطر الرقمية is the result of a partnership between the Qatar Foundation, the Qatar National Library and The British Library. It covers modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region, and contains maps, documents, manuscripts, sound recordings and photographs, including those of the British Bahrain Agency and British Residency at Bushire.
- Asnad Digital Persian Archive - بايگانى ديجيتالى اسناد فارسى is a research project of the Chair of Iranian Studies at the University of Bamberg. It aims to facilitate access to the growing number of available Persian historical deeds and documents, both published and unpublished, from Iran, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent.
- National Security Archive was founded in 1985 by American journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy. It combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center; research institute on international affairs; library and archive of declassified U.S. documents etc. Section on the Middle East offers coverage from ca. 1953 to the present.
Historical Newspapers
- Ankara University, Faculty of Political Sciences Library's collection of digitized newspapers dating back to the year 1800. The database contains 18 newspapers in Ottoman and Turkish, including Servet-i Fünun, Takvim-i Vekayi, Tercüman-ı Hakikat, Akşam, Ulus, Vatan, Cumhuriyet and others.
- Jrayed - Arabic Newspaper Archive of Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine is a digital archive of Arabic newspapers and journals primarily from late Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. The collection spans a variety of newspapers from dailies to quarterly periodicals, and includes Al-Difa' (الدفاع), Falastin (فلسطين), Al-Karmel (الكرمل), Al-Muntada (المنتدى) etc.
- Historical Jewish Press is a collaboration between Tel Aviv University and the National Library of Israel to make available online Jewish newspapers and journals published in the past, including extremely rare newspapers to which access has been previously impossible. Includes HaMeʼasef (המאסף), HaMagid (המגיד), HaMelits (המליץ) etc.
- Nashriyah: Digital Iranian History is a digital archive of Iranian newspapers and periodicals capturing key historical events as they happened. Led by the University of Manchester Library, Nashriyah collection includes Āyandigān (آیندگان), Khāk va khūn (خاک و خون), Rastākhīz (رستاخیز), Kayhān (کیهان) and others.
- Digitization Project Translatio at the Department of Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Languages of the Institute for Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn focuses on Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish periodicals published during the Middle Eastern and Asian “saddle period” between 1860 and 1945.
Books & Manuscripts
- Arabic Collections Online (ACO) - المجموعات العربية على الانترنِت is a digital library of public domain Arabic language content. ACO currently provides digital access to 17,699 volumes (out of the planned 23,000) across 10,473 subjects drawn from rich Arabic collections of distinguished research libraries.
- Hebrew Books was founded in order to preserve old American Hebrew books that are out of print and/or circulation, but has since expanded to include all Torah Seforim ever printed, and has reached 50,000 digitized books.
- Serialized Novels in Turkish Literature - Türk Edebiyatında Tefrika Romanlar is a project that involved scanning 300 periodicals published in Arabic alphabet until 1928 and identifying serialized novels published in them. Full texts of the non-copyrighted novels, and the first and last serializations of the novels that still have copyrights, are included.
- Islamic Heritage Project is a digital collection of Islamic manuscripts, published texts and maps from Harvard University's libraries and museums. Materials come from West, South, Southeast and Central Asia, and date from 10th to 20th centuries. Represented languages include Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, Chagatai, Malay, Gujarati, Indic and Western languages.
- Manuscripts of the Muslim World is a joint effort from Columbia University, the Free Library of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, which aims to make accessible digital editions of more than 500 manuscripts and 827 paintings from the Islamicate world from 1000 to 1900. Manuscripts are in Arabic and Persian, along with examples of Coptic, Samaritan, Syriac, Turkish and Berber.
Journals
- AlSharekh Archives - أرشيف الشارخ is one of the most distinguished Arabic digitization initiatives. It is the first and only one to focus on the content of literary journals providing online access to the content of 228 Arabic literary journals from 23 Arab countries, dating from the early Arab renaissance in the mid-19th century to the early 21st century.
- DergiPark is a digital platform run by Turkish Academic Network and Information Center (TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM) that aims to provide online hosting services and an editorial workflow management system for academic journals published in Turkey.
- Türkiye Makaleler Bibliyografyası is a project that allows searching through more than 1 million scholarly articles, published in 5,000 Turkish academic journals between 1923 and present, from a single interface.
Dictionaries
- Lexilogos brings together online dictionaries for over 150 languages of the world. Where available, grammar books and various texts in original languages are also provided. These include Arabic, Ancient and Biblical Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, Kurdish, Old Persian, Modern Persian, Syriac, Ottoman and Modern Turkish.
- Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic - معجم الدوحة التاريخي للغة العربية is an ongoing project at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Doha, Qatar. First two phases of the project have covered the history of the language from the oldest documented Arabic texts up to the year 500 AH (1106/1107 AD).
- The Living Arabic Project - العربية لغة حية is an effort to show Arabic as a living language by allowing users to search in both a Classical Arabic dictionary and a dialect dictionary at the same time. Dialects include Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi, Gulf, North African, Sudanese and Yemeni.
- Combined Persian Dictionaries at the University of Chicago allow combined searching of entries in Sulayman Hayyim's New Persian-English Dictionary and Francis Joseph Steingass's A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary. Search results are displayed in Persian alphabetical order, sorted by entry word.
- Coptic Dictionary Online is a collaborative effort of several German universities that aims to make it easy to look up Coptic words in all dialects, with translations available in English, French and German.
Maps
- Map Collections of the Library of Congress make up one of the largest and most comprehensive cartographic collections in the world with over 5.5 million maps, 80,000 atlases, 6,000 reference works, over 500 globes and globe gores, 3,000 raised relief models, and a large number of cartographic materials in other formats, including over 19,000 CDs/DVDs. Search available by map or by collection.
- David Rumsey Map Collection contains more than 200,000 maps from around 1550 to the present. It focuses on rare maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, globes, wall maps, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children's and manuscript maps.
- 19th-Century Maps of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia contains scans of 19th-century maps of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia that are held at the University of Chicago Library's Map Collection. Most were published in Western Europe to support colonial activities in the region such as exploration, scientific research, resource exploitation, conquest and administration.
- Old Maps Online is an online search catalog that allows visitors to locate and explore historical maps from libraries around the world. One of the goals of the project is to build a community of maps enthusiasts and crowdsource information. Creating an account lets users georeference, upload and favorite maps they find on the web, compare and overlay their own scanned maps, and get links for use in GIS apps.
- Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection (PCLMC) at the University of Texas-Austin comprises more than 350,000 items representing all areas of the world. Sections on Africa and the Middle East, as well as Topical Maps, might be of particular interest.
Photographs
- Abdul Hamid II Collection at the Library of Congress 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.
- American Geographical Society Library (AGSL)'s Digital Photo Archive – Africa and Digital Photo Archive – Asia and Middle East contain images from the AGSL collections acquired over many decades.
- Akkasah: the Photography Archive at New York University Abu Dhabi is part of al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art dedicated to documenting and preserving the diverse histories and practices of photography from the region, with over 33,000 images at present.
- Eliasaf Robinson Tel Aviv Collection is a digitized collection of posters, postcards, photographs and other materials about the early history of Tel Aviv, assembled over 40 years by its native son and most prominent antiquarian bookseller, Eliasaf Robinson.
- Hamid Naficy Middle Eastern Movie Posters Collection at the Northwestern University contains 249 digitized film posters. These posters document the social history of film in Iran and offer a unique visual representation of the political and social climate between 1966 and 2014.
- Matson Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress consists of over 22,000 digitized negatives and transparencies created by the American Colony Photo Department and its successor firm, the Matson Photo Service, the majority of which depict Palestine from 1898 to 1946.
- Middle East Photograph Archive at the University of Chicago consists of over 400 digitized photographic prints dating primarily from the second half of the 19th century, with a special focus on Egypt and Cairo in particular.
Video Archives
- British Movietone News was a sound newsreel launched on 9 June 1929 by an offshoot of the US company Fox Movietone. It was the first sound newsreel to be distributed in Britain, and ran until 27 May 1979. British Movietone YouTube channel includes hundreds of videos with archival footage from the Middle East and North Africa, among others.