Resource Websites

AMIR: Access to Mideast and Islamic Resources.  The blog about Open-Access material relating to the Middle East is available at: http://amirmideast.blogspot.com/

APD: Arabic Papyrology Database, 2004-2015.  The project of the International Society Arabic Papyrology will eventually provide access to the published editions of about 2,500 Arabic documents written on papyrus, parchment, or paper.  The database is available at: http://www.apd.gwi.uni-muenchen.de:8080/apd/project.jsp

ARABTERM Technical Dictionary.  The project airms to provide generally accessible reference for the consistent translation of textbooks, curricula, technical manuals and other specialized texts.  Its contents is organized by industry sectors.  The project is a joint publication of the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ); available at: http://www.arabterm.org/index.php?id=1&L=1

The Arabian Nights Bibliography, compiled by Ulrich Marzolph, 2013-.  The list is a representative selection of research publications on the Arabian Nights published in European languages and including some important books and articles published in other languages.  The bibliography is comprehensive, and not exhaustive, but updated at regular intervals; available at: http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~enzmaer/arabiannights-engl-elektr.html

Arabic and Latin Glossary, ed. Dag Nikolaus Hasse with the assistance of Reinhard Kiesler, Barbara Jockers, and Katrin Fischer, 2005-.  The project was developed at the Forschungsstelle Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte der griechisch-arabisch-lateinischen Tradition at the Institut für Philosophie of the Julius–Maximilians–Universität Würzburg; available at: http://www.philosophie.uni-wuerzburg.de/arabic-latin-glossary/?nav=b&sconf=3&page=1

Bibliographical Handouts by Dr. Sebastian Brock, Dumbarton Oaks: Research Library and Collection, 2013.  Dr. Brock created these handouts between 1995 and 2012, teaching Syriac Studies at the Oriental Institute, University of Oxford.  The Dumbarton Oaks resource website was compiled with the help of Christopher Mooney, and is available at: http://www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/resources/syriac/brock

Bibliography on Christianity in Palestine/Eretz-Israel, Center for the Study of Christianity of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2000-.  Available at: http://www.csc.org.il/db/db.aspx?db=Holy.Land

BVMM: Bibliothèque Virtuelle des Manuscrits Médiévaux.  The database of medieval manuscripts in French libraries is best searched by shelf number, though it is necessary to use other databases such as the CGM or Medium to determine the shelf number; available at: http://bvmm.irht.cnrs.fr/

Calames: Online Catalogue of Archives and Manuscripts in French University and Research Libraries.  Available at: http://www.calames.abes.fr/pub/

CALD: The Corpus of Arabic Legal Documents, 2009-2013.  The online database comprises the primary sources for Islamic law and legal practice in pre-modern Muslim societies, and provides the first ever collection of scattered editions of legal documents from the eighth to the fifteenth century, often with improved readings compared to earlier print versions. All documents are presented with the Arabic text in modern spelling and with full bibliographical data.  Available at: http://cald.irht.cnrs.fr/php/ilm.php

CGM: Catalogue général des manuscrits, 1849-1993.  The website aggregates links to online databases, created by the retroactive conversion of the printed union catalog of manuscripts in France’s public libraries; in other words, the CGM does not comprise manuscript holdings in France’s research and university libraries.  Available at: http://www.bonnespratiques-ead.net/sites/default/files/structure_CGM_imprime.html  For more information about the CGM website and its use, see Florent Paulluault’s article in the Bulletin des Bibliothèques de France (54/1, 2009).

CollateX: Software for Collating Textual Sources, 2010-. The software component can be embedded into other software or be made a part of a software system. Its function is the provision and advancement of current research in the field of computer-supported collation involving natural language texts. To this end the developers of CollateX put an emphasis on its flexible applicability, be it in terms of its runtime environment or be it in terms of the specific challenges CollateX has to cope with when applied to textual traditions of varying language, encoding or publication settings. For software, documentation, and continuing development via GitHub, see http://collatex.net/

A Comprehensive Bibliography on Syriac Christianity, compiled by Sergey Minov.  The introduction does not indicate the starting point of the active project; available at: http://www.csc.org.il/db/db.aspx?db=SB

COMSt: Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies.  The research network programme is funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) from 2009 until 2014. Its website offers outsiders access to the newsletter and provides a list of related research projects; available at: http://www1.uni-hamburg.de/COMST/index.html

Die Damaszener Familienbibliothek Refaiya, Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, 2008-2012.  The website provides access to digitized manuscripts as well as comprehensive cataloging and research, and is available at: http://www.refaiya.uni-leipzig.de/content/below

DataUp, California Digital Library.  The open source tool helps researchers document, manage, and archive their tabular data; available at: http://dataup.cdlib.org/

Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources, eds. Sara L. Uckelman et al., Durham University, 2015-.  The repository is available at: http://dmnes.org

A Digital Corpus for Graeco-Arabic Studies.  The collaborative project originated at Harvard and Tufts University, and provides access to a public-domain corpus of Greek and Arabic philosophical and scientific works; available at: http://www.graeco-arabic-studies.org/home.html

DigiPal: Digital Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic, Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, 2011-2014.  The website provides resources for the study of medieval handwriting, particularly that produced in England during the years 1000–1100, the time of Æthelred, Cnut and William the Conqueror, and is available at: http://www.digipal.eu/

digilibLT: Digital Library of Late-Antique Latin Texts, eds. Raffaella Tabacoo et al., Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, 2010-.  The database publishes prose texts written in Latin between the 2nd and the 7th century CE, and is available at: http://www.digiliblt.unipmn.it/

Digital Mapping + Geospatial Humanities, by Fred Gibbs.  Website with resources for a graduate course (LA 512, ARCH 462) on the technologies, tools, and workflows that can help collect, connect, and present online interpretations of space, while providing an introduction to the theoretical and practical challenges of deep mapping; available at: http://fredgibbs.net/courses/digital-mapping

Digital Persian Archive.  The  archive of digital surrogates of Persian language documents was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) from 2003 until 2007.  Christoph Werner (Centrum für Nah- und Mittelost-Studien, Philips Universität Marburg) initiated the project in 2003, and maintains its website, available at: http://www.asnad.org/

Digital Scriptorium.  The database of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts relies on extensive cataloging and sample images; available at: http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/digitalscriptorium/

Digitales Turfan-Archiv, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften.  For more information about Turfan collection in Berlin and the digitization project, see: http://www.bbaw.de/forschung/turfanforschung.  About 14,500 fragments in Turkic, Middle-Iranian and Mongolian languages are available at: http://turfan.bbaw.de/dta/index.html

DSAL: Digital South Asia Library.  The joint project of the University of Chicago and the Center for Research Libraries provides digital materials for reference and research on South Asia to scholars, public officials, business leaders, and other users; available at: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/

e-manuscripta.ch.  The digital platform for manuscript material from Swiss libraries and archives is available at: http://www.e-manuscripta.ch/

Encyclopedia of Mediterranean Humanism, published under the direction of Houari Touati, 2014-.  This Open-Access encyclopedia is published in Arabic, French and English, and its goal is to elucidate the diverse forms that humanism, understood as both a philological science and a philosophical outlook, has taken on in all the cultures of the Mediterranean world.  Available at: http://www.encyclopedie-humanisme.com/

Enigma.  The search engine was developed by the Digital Humanities department of the medievalist research network Histoire, archéologie, littératures des mondes chrétiens et musulmans médiévaux (CIHAM – UMR 5648).  The tool is designed to help scholars with deciphering Latin words which are difficult to read, and its website is available at: http://ciham-digital.huma-num.fr/enigma/index.php

EAGLE: Europeana Network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy.  The single user-friendly portal was established in 2013 and will provide access to the inscriptions of the Ancient World; available at: http://www.eagle-network.eu/

Europeana Portal.  The search engine for the digitized collections of museums, libraries, archives and galleries across Europe is available at: http://europeana.eu/portal/

Europeana Professional.  The common website for Europeana projects is the official source for technical information, metadata standards, and case studies, while providing a single platform for all project work; it is available at: http://pro.europeana.eu/

Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society.  The web portal is available at: http://www.jewishmanuscripts.org/  Among the website’s resources is a bibliography of Judeo-Arabic works that aims to eventually cover all works ever published in print.

Geographically Integrated History: GIS for Historians and Social Scientists, by J. B. Owens and May Yuan, 2009-2013.  The website offers a training manual for free download, as well as a tutorial, to introduce historians to the basic elements of GIS; available at: http://www.geographicallyintegratedhistory.com/

Glossarium Græco-Arabicum.  The database comprises the files of a lexical research project about the medieval Arabic translations from the Greek, and supplements the analytical reference dictionary A Greek and Arabic Lexicon (vol. 1/1-, Leiden: Brill, 1992-); available at: https://telotadev.bbaw.de/glossga/

Gnomon Bibliographische Datenbank: Eichstätter Informationssystem für die Klassische Altertumswissenschaft.  The database by Jürgen Malitz und Gregor Weber was originally a subscriber-only resource, distributed by C. H. Beck (Munich) on CD Roms.  The database is now an Open-Access resource on the internet, available at: http://www.gnomon-online.de/

Guide du lecteur du département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2014.  Available at: http://bnf.libguides.com/manuscrits

ILM: Islamic Law Materialized, 2009-2013.  The bibliography was compiled in connection with the ERC project ILM under the direction of Christian Müller; available at: http://www.ilm-project.net/en/biblio

Internet Islamic History Sourcebook, compiled by Paul Halsall, 1998-2007.  The systematic bibliography belongs to the Internet History Sourcebooks Project, and is available at: http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/islam/islamsbook.asp

IRHT: Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes.  The independent research group of the CNRS maintains on its website a page dedicated to resources for the study of manuscripts from Antiquity to the Renaissance; available at: http://www.irht.cnrs.fr/ressources

Islamic Manuscripts.  Resource website of McGill Library that provides information about the holdings of McGill University as well as information about catalogs and online resources; available at: http://www.mcgill.ca/library/find/subjects/humanities/islamic/manuscripts/

Islamic Manuscripts.  Resource website of Jan Just Witkam, professor emeritus of paleography and codicology of the Islamic world, Leiden University; available at: http://www.islamicmanuscripts.info/index.html

ISMI: Islamic Scientific Manuscripts Initiative, under the direction of Lorraine Daston (MPIWG), Jamil Ragep (McGill University) and Sally Ragep (McGill University), 2006-2013.  For a description of the project, see https://www.rasi.mcgill.ca/ISMI_SharedLegacy.pdf  At present the website provides links to 123 digitized manuscripts held in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and to a prosopographical database with entries for about 2,200 personal names; available at: https://ismi.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/drupal-ismi/node/36808

ISTC: Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue.  The international database of fifteenth-century printing has been in development at the British Library since 1980; available at: http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/index.html

The Jews in the Medieval Muslim World, compiled by James Theodore Robinson, 2012-.  The website with a systematic listing of resources is available at: http://home.uchicago.edu/~jtr/resources.html

Jordanus: An International Catalogue of Mediaeval Scientific Manuscripts, curated by Menso Folkerts.  The database provides information about medieval manuscripts that were written in Western Europe between 500 and 1500 CE, and which concern the mathematical sciences, i.e., arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry and mechanics.  Available at: http://jordanus.badw.de/

Late Medieval English Scribes, by Linne R. Mooney, Simon Horobin, and Estelle Stubbs, 2007-2011.  The online catalog comprises all scribal hands, identified as well as unidentified, which appear in the manuscripts of the English writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Trevisa, William Langland, and Thomas Hoccleve; available at: http://www.medievalscribes.com/

A Literary History of Medicine, a research project directed by Emilie Savage-Smith (University of Oxford) and Simon Swain (University of Warwick), 2014-2017.  The Kitāb ʿuyūn al-anbāʾ fī ṭabaqāt al-aṭibbāʾ by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah (d. 1270) is a biographical dictionary covering 442 physicians, and the research team will prepare a new edition of the Arabic text, together with a complete English translation.  The accompanying website is available at: http://krc2.orient.ox.ac.uk/alhom/index.php/en/

Ma’agarim.  The website features the corpus of Hebrew texts of the Historical Dictionary Project of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, and can be accessed via: http://daf.hebrew-academy.org.il/maagarim-help-english/

Manuscripta Mediaevalia.  Resource website that informs about manuscript research projects and provides free access to databases in German speaking countries; available at: http://www.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de/

Manuscripts Online: Written Culture 1000 to 1500.  The search engine provides access to a diverse body of online primary resources relating to written and early printed culture in Britain during the period 1000 to 1500 and covering literary manuscripts, historical documents and early printed books which are located on websites owned by libraries, archives, universities and publishers; available at: http://www.manuscriptsonline.org/

The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Mddle Ages, ed. David Badke, 2010-2011.  The resource website is available at: http://bestiary.ca/index.html 

Medium: Gestion des reproductions de manuscrits.  Database of all digital surrogates of the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (IRHT). Available at: http://medium.irht.cnrs.fr/

MENALIB: The Middle East Virtual Library, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg.  The information portal for Middle East, North African, and Islamic Studies provides access to electronic fulltext materials or electronic bibliographical records of printed materials and manuscripts; available at: http://www.menalib.de/

Michaelle Biddle.  Homepage of the conservator of Wesleyan University who specializes in West African manuscripts; available at: http://works.bepress.com/mbiddle/

Mirabile.  The knowledge management system for research on medieval culture was developed by the Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino and the Fondazione Ezio Franceschini Onlus in Florence, in partnership with other institutions.  Open-Access is provided to the Romance and the hagiography databases, as well as to the bibliography of manuscripts and to the author index in the medieval Latin database; available at: http://www.mirabileweb.it

MMIE: Measuring the Medieval Islamic Economy, Western University, Ontario, 2014-.  The project of Maya Shatzmiller is devoted to collecting quantifiable data related to the economic performance of medieval Muslim societies in the Middle East and North Africa between the seventh and early sixteenth century CE.  The project’s website is available at: http://medievalislamiceconomy.com

Mo3jam.  The user-generated dictionary of colloquial Arabic was developed by the Saudi developer Abdullah Arif, and is available at: http://en.mo3jam.com/

OADTL: Open-Access Digital Theological Library.  The DTL: Digital Theological Library was initiated by The Claremont School of Theology (https://libguides.thedtl.org/about) as a co-owned, born-digital library of religious and theological studies.  The DTL is a non-profit corporation with the mission of supporting higher education in the study of religion (https://oadtl.org/faq), and its staff maintains the OADTL.  The OADTL is funded by the institutional members of the DTLAccording to its first Newsletter (February 2019), the OADTL was launched about August 2018.  The OADTL is available at: https://oadtl.org/

OPENN: Primary Digital Resources Available to Everyone.  The website contains complete sets of high-resolution archival images of manuscripts from the collection of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries and other institutions, along with machine-readable TEI P5 descriptions and technical metadata.  The depository is available at: http://openn.library.upenn.edu/

PACE: The Project on Ancient Cultural Engagement.  The project was initiated by Steve Mason.  It focuses on a few important authors from the ancient world who stand conspicuously at the confluence of cultures, and the project’s participants are now engaged in building resources around these authors.  The website is available at: http://pace-ancient. mcmaster.ca

PapPal, Sonderforschungsbereich 933, Materiale Textkulturen, Universität Heidelberg. The website facilitates the study of ancient writing by collecting images of dated papyri in order to illustrate the development and diversity of ancient scripts, and to assist in dating undated texts; available at: http://www.pappal.info/

Papyri.info.  The project combines the Papyrological Navigator (PN) that supports searching, browsing, and aggregation of ancient papyrological documents and related materials with the Papyrological Editor (PE) that enables multi-author, version controlled, peer reviewed scholarly curation of papyrological texts, translations, commentary, scholarly metadata, institutional catalog records, bibliography, and images. The project aggregates material from separate papyrological databases and depends on close collaboration with Trismegistos. The website is available at: http://papyri.info/

Penn in Hand: Selected Manuscripts.  A database with bibliographic information and digital facsimiles for selected collections of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Pennsylvania, as well as those manuscripts privately owned by Lawrence J. Schoenberg; available at: http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/medren/index.html

Perso-Indica: An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions, Paris, 2010-.  The research project is directed by Fabrizio Speziale, and will produce an online publication (ISSN 2267-2753) that covers the treatises and translations produced in India between the 13th and the 19th century; available at: http://perso-indica.net/index.faces

Princeton Geniza Lab, 2015-.  Under the directorship of Marina Rustow the Princeton Geniza Project has expanded its mission, so that the new platform will eventually link the digital surrogates of manuscript fragments to their transcriptions and translations.  In order to promote research, the new database will include, whenever available, multiple transcriptions and translations of the same fragment; for more information, see: https://www.princeton.edu/~geniza/about.html

Princeton Geniza Project, 1985-.  The project is dedicated to transcribing documents from film copies to computer files, creating a full-text retrieval text-base of transcribed documents found in the Geniza chamber of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo in the late 19th century; available at: http://etc.princeton.edu/genizaproject/

RCCC: Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue, by Brenda Hosington et al., University of Warwick, 2007-2010.  The Open-Access database lists all translations out of and into all languages printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland before 1641, as well as all translations out of all languages into English printed abroad before 1641.  For a short description of the project, see: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/culturalcrossroads/  The database is available at: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/rcc/

RELMIN: The Legal Status of Religious Minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean World (5th-15th centuries).  For information about the project, which is funded by the Ideas Program of the European Research Council’s Seventh Framework Program from 2010 until 2015, see its website, available at: http://www.relmin.eu/.  Its database of original texts in languages, such as Latin, Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew, is available t:http://www.cn-telma.fr/relmin/index/

Repertorium Chronicarum.  The bibliography of the manuscripts of medieval Latin chronicles aims at becoming a crowd-sourced project, directed by Dan Embree (Mississippi State University) and Jacek Soszynski (University of Warsaw); available at: http://www.chronica.msstate.edu

Scriptorium. 1/1- (1946-).  For a search of all issues, see the journal’s website at: http://www.scriptorium.be/revue.php  Free access to the issues published between 1946 and 1976 is available via Persée at: http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/revue/scrip

Syri.ac: An Annotated Bibliography of Syriac Resources Online, eds. Scott Johnson and Jack Tannous, 2015-; available at: http://syri.ac

The Syriac Gazetteer, edited by Thomas A. Carlson and David A. Michelson.  The geographical reference work provides information about places relevant to Syriac Studies; available at: http://syriaca.org/geo/index.html

Translation: Die kognitive Aneignung europäischer Schlüsselkonzepte in asiatischen und nahöstlichen Gesellschaften (1860-1945), 2013-2014.  The research project about the Muslim reception of European concepts in the Middle East and Asia between 1860 and 1945 is accompanied by an Open-Access database which collects digital surrogates of Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman newspapers; available at: http://www.translatio.uni-bonn.de/

Urdu Thesaurus.  The Open-Access resource is the work of Musharraf Ali Farooqi, and its website and accompanying mobile app is supported by KITAB. The beta version was launched in July 2016; available at: http://www.urduthesaurus.com/

USTC: Universal Short Title Catalogue, University of St. Andrews, 2011-.  A collective database of all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and 1650; available at: http://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ustc/

Virtual Manuscript Exhibitions.  The  page on the website of MELCom International provides links of permanent online exhibitions of manuscripts and printed books in Arabic script; available at: http://www.melcominternational.org/?page_id=441

The Zekr Project.  Customizable Open-Source software for Quran studies, provides access to the Arabic text and commentaries, as well as audio files of Quran recitation and a range of translations; available at: http://zekr.org/quran/en/  At the moment, the software is available in eleven languages (i.e., English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Bosnian, Arabic, simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean), but not in Persian, Turkish, Urdu, or Russian.

 

Dagmar A. Riedel

Last updated, 19 June 2020

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