Forum on Remote Research Possibilities for Graduate Students - Session 2

Good afternoon. My name is Ali Behdad and

I'm the director of the Center for Near

Eastern Studies at UCLA and on behalf of

my colleagues, I would like to welcome

you to this forum on remote research. It

is difficult to recall a time when doing

research in the Middle East has been

more challenging, whether as a result of

the coronavirus epidemic, officially

sanctioned restrictions on research, or

political violence. In light of these

challenges, we at the Center for Near

Eastern Studies have organized this

[three]-part forum for scholars and students

who need or wish to undertake research

on Middle Eastern topics in various

fields of Humanities and Social Sciences,

at least in the near future. I'm pleased

to introduce two distinguished scholars

and librarians in this panel who will

share the knowledge of online resources

and offer advice for doing research

during these challenging times. Our first

speaker is Ginny Danielson, who is the

director of libraries at New York

University Abu Dhabi campus. She

previously served as the Richard F. French

Librarian of the Loeb Music Library at

Harvard University and the curator the

university's Archive of World Music. She

holds a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the

University of Illinois at

Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Danielson is the author of the

award-winning monograph 'The Voice of

Egypt:' Umma Kulthum, Arabic Song and

Egyptian Society in the 20th Century,

which was published by University of

Chicago Press in 1997 and co-editor of

The Middle East of The Garland

Encyclopedia of World Music, which was

published by Routledge in 2002. She has

worked extensively on producing digital

resources for scholarly use and in her

current incarnation, she is a

principal investigator of the Arabic

Collections Online, a collaborative

digital book project. Our second speaker

is Robin Dougherty (Yale) who is the curator for

the Near Eastern Collection.

She has a BA in Oriental Studies from

the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in

Arabic Studies from Georgetown

University, and a Master of Information and

Library Studies from the University of

Michigan.

She has most recently served as the

Middle Eastern Studies Librarian of the

University of Texas in Austin and has

held library posts at the American

University in Cairo, Oxford University,

the Library of Congress, and the

University of Pennsylvania. She has an

extensive record of publication and

leadership in her field and the ability

to work with Arabic, Persian, and Turkish

materials has made her an incredible

resource for Middle Eastern research. She

has also studied ancient Egyptian and

Coptic. Dr. Danielson and Dr. Dougherty will

each speak for about 20 minutes followed

by question-and-answer. Please join me

in welcoming them. Thank you Dr. [Behdad]. I

should add one thing to my resume, which

is that I'm recently retired so I'm,

which is, which has been a wonderful

thing for me to be able to get back to

some work some writing that I really

wanted to do but I also have learned

that I've been successfully replaced,

which is perhaps a good lesson for all

of us. So I'm going to, I'm going to share

my screen with you. Alright, I hope

you're looking at the name Arabic

Collections Online. This is a project

that, as Dr. [Behdad] said, I've been involved

with as a co-principal investigator for

a number of years. Right now, it's a

digital collection of 14,000, a little

over 14,000, Arabic scholarly books. It's

available free of charge online, you

don't need to set up an account, you can

just log in and use it and the

collections come from the libraries that

you can see on your screen and I'll

rattle them off because some of them are

small. NYU, which is the project

originator, NYU Abu Dhabi, Columbia, the

American University in

Cairo, the American University in Beirut,

Princeton, Cornell, the Qatar National

Library, and the National Archives of the

United Arab Emirates. Now you may ask: why

these libraries? The reason for that

is is actually very straightforward and

a little bureaucratic. When NYU conceived

this project, it's a big complicated

project as you may imagine with all

these partners, and so what NYU did is it

started with universities that have

excellent Arabic collections with whom

NYU had already done collaborative work.

The idea is not to limit the collection

to these libraries but to start with

these libraries, figuring that in complex

for a big complex endeavor it's at least

easier if you've worked with the

partners before. So that's why these

libraries are the ones that are

contributors right now and then, the hope

is, that once we actually finish, er I'm

still saying we, once the the holdings of

these libraries are actually finished,

then the project would move on and would

and would include other collections.

You'll find a wide variety of subjects

in Arabic collections online including

novels, poetry, language, grammar,

biographies, society social studies, and

economic studies, literary criticism,

history, Islamic law and religious

studies of all kinds. You will find

perhaps a little bit less of math and

science and that's because since roughly

the middle of the 19th century, many Arab

writers have published their

writers in the areas of math and science

have published their work in European

languages. So there's a little bit less

of that but, but it's, but it's there so a

wide variety of subjects and, of course,

if you can if you think back to the

libraries from which these these these

works were chosen,

these are good scholarly collections so

the quality of the of the books is is is

very high. These are rich Arabic

collections. You're going to find a lot

of books that are hard to find or are

out of print and here's a real favorite

of mine Hashim Rajab's al-Maqam al-

'Iraqi. This this particular book is only

held by seven libraries in North America

that I can find. It's never been

reprinted and so the only way that most

of us would have access to this is

through interlibrary loan and we all

know how well that would work in this,

in these days. So this is the kind of

thing that you can find and there's,

there are a number of them here. Here's

a work on ethics, and ethics and the

psychology of religion from the 1940s,

again, unavailable. These books you know

never reprinted and you know in many

it's, it's a problem with a lot of Arabic

books is that they haven't been ever

reprinted. And then this is an

interesting one: this is, this is a rather

controversial look at Jahili poetry by

Taha Hussayn, another very hard to find, it's a

hard to find book and it's available

right here and it's not one of Taha

Hussayn's best-known works but it's very

in, it's a very interesting one. There's

depth in the subject matter here.

There are over forty forty works by

[Tafikl Hakim] the playwright another

ninety publications by Taha Hussayn

himself and so you can find, you can find

quite a bit of literature a basic Arabic

literature, classical, I mean classical in

the Western sense of canonical, that's

what I should have said, canonical

literature perhaps

not in the Edition that you would

most like to have but possibly you can

find something, you can find an addition

that will tide you over until you find

you're able to get at the the edition

that you would most like. How do you find

it? You can get Google, of course, Arabic

Collections Online, or go to

dlib.nyu.edu/aco

and here's where you land. For most

of you I think navigation will be very

simple in the working with this page it

works just about exactly like you'd

expect.

You've got Home, you've got About, Other

Resources is an interesting list of

other online resources that are

available free of charg and I no doubt

will include some that Robin's about to

mention browse, browse by category, and

search.

And you can, you know, read more. There's

an update here on on what what's new

with the project. There are search tips

which you can find by clicking on the

search page and there is help in Arabic

and English. Now you should use this

because if there's if you find something

wrong with the database the staff is

good at fixing it quickly and you can

get a response, as I said, in Arabic and

English, and the woman who is most likely

to take your query also can respond in

French. So it's um it's a very useful

service and you can just ask 'how do I do

X?' or 'how do I do Y?' If there's a

technical problem, it may take overnight

to fix but somebody will attend to it if

you draw attention to it. I will take the

opportunity to relate one little

anecdote we did get a suggestion one

time years ago from a gentleman in a

predominantly Sunni community in the

Middle East who told us that we had

altogether too many books on Shi'ism

something we should take some of them

away, which we did not do. Once you find

what you want, you'll be looking at a

page something like this and again you

can see at the top the black bar gives

you various options for rearranging the

page if you look to the left you'll find

descriptions for instructions for how to

download what you're looking at as a PDF

and then in addition to the navigation

arrows that will take you left and right

from page by page by page at the bottom

you can't see it on this screen but you

will if you log on to that or if you

open the application. There's a bar along

the bottom that allows you to scroll

quickly from one place to the next

within the book so you don't have to go

page by page by page.

You can print the entire book, the page

you're looking at, whatever you want. You

can search in Arabic or Roman

transliteration and the transliteration

system is that that is used is the same

one that is used in American libraries

so it would be familiar to you. You can

download books, you can read online, you

can do just about anything you want to

do. All of the books in this resource are

out of copyright, as far as we know, in

the countries in which they were

published. This was a matter of research,

of substantial research, of copyright law

done by one of NYU's lawyers at the

beginning of the project and we, of

course, also have a takedown policy in

case a mistake has been made and

something is actually in copyright. The

project has been online for almost ten

years and as far as I know we've never

had a complaint, so I believe that the usage

is, that the presentation of books is and

your access to them is legal in in local

terms. This is a point that Robin will

probably also make: if you don't find

what you're looking for on the first

search, try a different search. In big

libraries such as UCLA's, there, the

library catalog may think a little bit

differently than you do. There may be a

mistake somewhere in the cataloging and

so you should never assume that

something isn't there based on a single

search. Always try something else and

then if you can't find it there then it

might be worth a question, you know, is

the book in the collection or or or not

it might be worth a different line of

approach. I'm going to mention one fairly

serious limitation to this collection

and that is you can search the

the descriptions of books, that is, the

cataloguing. You cannot yet search within

the books. This, OCR for Arabic as many of

you may know is a very difficult and

complicated matter and the the library

in NYU was just making some progress on

on OCR for Arabic this spring and like

many other things in our world that has

been shut down;

but this searching within books is

coming and hopefully it's not too far in

the future. So with that I'll say thank

you for your attention and turn you over

to Robin. Thank you so much Ginny um for

that fabulous presentation. That's a great

lead-in to what I have to say, if you

just excuse me for one second to start

my timer so I don't go over time because

I want to be sure that you guys have

enough time to ask questions. So once

again my name is Robin Dougherty and I'm

librarian for Middle East Studies at Yale

University and I'm also interim

librarian for African Studies. That's

just another thing that happens when

people retire and we don't have funding

to hire new staff so I have a wear a lot

of hats and what I wanted to do was, what

I'm going to do I'm a I don't know who

attended Monday's session so a little

bit of what I say may overlap with

Monday but as I was explaining to

Professor Behdad the uh Dale Correa's

presentation on Monday, she and I are

very different kinds of people. We have

different interests and whatever I say

that similar to what Dale said or what even

Ginny said I may have my own little

twist or twist or approach to it. So I'm

going to attempt to share my screen. I utterly

failed with PowerPoint except for this.

This is going to be about remote

research in Middle East Studies for you

guys or how I learned to stop worrying

and just get on with it.

So if you've ever seen the movie Dr.

Strangelove you'll recognize the

gentleman down here in the lower right.

He's a strange doctor for strange times

and those are the times that were in.

So if you've never seen this movie

perfect viewing for our lockdown

situation. So enough of that silliness,

okey-dokey.

Now I know that Dale mentioned the

Hazine blog when she spoke to you

on Monday. I have to concur this is an

incredible project. If you are not

familiar with this blog, you should find

a way to familiarize yourself. Spend some

time here. The other thing that I want to

point out, just in case it wasn't said

before, is that this blog is created by

people who are pretty much just like you

or who were recently you. It's not

exclusively created by people who are

already full-blown professional

academics. They encourage submissions, uh

many of the people who have written

posts our graduate students,, people who

have just returned from fieldwork and

so they offer a very important

perspective on how to actually use

collections and given the fact that, you

know, it's unlikely anybody's going to be

traveling any time soon

this is your chance to sort of fit, you

know, do your homework for your hopeful

field trip of adventures in the future

and figure out, you know, what is the deal

with the various archives in Egypt, or in

the Middle East, for example, what what's

in them and there's even nitty-gritty

about, you know, what to work with the staff,

you know, how to be nice to the staff, how

they appreciate being approached, all

kinds of practical details of working in

archives all over the world. Let

me see, the other thing that I like about

this and the other thing I want to be

sure to point out is it is certainly not

comprehensive. So it only lists three

online archives, well that's because

they've only had three people write

about them so consider these any

lacuna that you see as opportunities

from your potential writing and

submission to this blog, as I say they

welcome this kind of thing. Description

of libraries around the Middle East,

let me see mine

scroll all the way down, but again, it's

sort of library by library descriptions.

Then these sort of essays on just

various aspects of resources that are

important for you guys for doing your

research. I just can't say enough

positive things about this project; it's

truly amazing. The other thing that is

nice about it is that you can search the

blog about it it's it puts everything in

these kind of big buckets, so Ginny made

a reference to how things are organized

and this is not put together exclusively

by librarians. A couple of the

contributors are now librarians but they

may be they aren't all and so the way

that this is organized requires a bit of

browsing and clicking around and you can

search but again, as Ginny already

mentioned, be careful about the terms

that you use to search on. So, for example,

there's a blog that that Dale mentioned

on Monday called AMIR and you can search

for it in the search box here and, just

wait for one second. Well it doesn't pop

up by itself because it's part of

another post so you need to sort of be

aware of that. It's in this one for sure.

This contributor N.A. Mansour is at

Princeton. This contributor is an

advanced graduate student but she hasn't

finished her Ph.D. yet so this is an

example of the kind of post that you

could contribute. This is a very thorough

but not a comprehensive list of

resources that this person has

identified as being useful and somewhere

around and here is AMIR, in fact, I can

just search the page to find AMIR.

Now, another thing I want to point out

specifically is AMIR is a tremendous

blog and from this particular blog post

all that you will learn about AMIR is

that it's a great tool to find material

online so it doesn't still don't tell

you much about what this really is but

if you actually go to the blog, well this

is it right here. What it actually is, is

it as a compilation of open access

resources so the Hazine post doesn't

specifically indicate

the fact that AMIR is a place where

a bunch of our colleagues have collected

things that are specifically open access

and they're doing the best they can.

There's a lot of material in here but

but that's the the reigning definition

of what goes into the AMIR blog so

Hazine is great for finding things but

it doesn't necessarily tell you

everything you might want to know about

what a thing really is. The other thing I

noticed and again this is relevant to

what Ginny said a second ago, I tried

searching open access beacuse I know that

AMIR it was open access that's its specialty,

that's the kind of materials that it

includes, and I thought, you know, maybe

somewhere else in the Hazine blog they

collect things that are specifically

open access and I tried this and and

I found, let me see, these but if you do,

let me see, it doesn't say, as I sais, it

doesn't say that AMIR specifically is

open access but you can, so you

wouldn't have found AMIR as an open

access blog you would have found other

things as open access resources so like,

I say, just sort of pay attention to the

terminology that's used to describe

things and what may or may not be

missing and I feel obligated to point

out that Hazine, as a fabulous tool as it

is, it's a bit of an outgrowth from a

slightly older tool that preceded it

called Fresh from the Archives. This tool

seems to be moribund, unfortunately, but

it was a similar idea where students

returning from various libraries around

the world in archives would actually

write up their experiences of actually

using these things so this was really, you

know, they even said things like how much

does it cost to make photocopies, how

receptive are the idea of digitizing

things and putting them on a CD-ROM for

you or on a hard drive or, you know, all

of these, where is the nearest coffee

shop, you know, things that graduate

students really need to know but

unfortunately, um this very useful

resource seems to have gone quiet and it

was, as you can see, about much more of

the world and many, many different

disciplines not specifically

Middle East-related, which Hazine is

definitely a Middle East-related so just

wanted to point out to you, you may

sometimes, you may possibly hear about

this Fresh from the Archives, but Hazine

is a worthy successor to it. So let

me see, I've talked a little bit about

AMIR. Oh, the one thing that I

particularly find useful in AMIR is a

one particular blog post where it lists,

it is an alphabetical list of historical

newspapers. Now this is a bunch of

librarians but even though the

contributors are, let me see, here they

are, I think most of them are librarians,

even though that they are professionals

they are still not using their

professional skills maybe to the maximum

to organize their blog in the most

efficient way. So while there is a link

in all of this long tag list to

newspapers and it's down here under N,

Whoa they should have done like an A to Z

sort of thing to make it easier, there's

newspapers, and you see there's 35 posts

well that's 35 blog posts about separate

newspaper titles, it's, none of these

posts link back to their fabulous

alphabetical list of historical

newspapers. The only way to find it is to

do the word alphabetical in this search

box and then it's still, is it going

yeah it's spinning round and round, please

don't break down on me, now wait just one

second, come along come along. Oh

my god. It's there believe me,

in any case, uh what it is, I'll just

describe it for you since I am having a

hard time reaching it, which could be

due to any number of reasons. It's a very

long, it's a very long list arranged by

country, which is super useful of

historical newspapers that are available

by open access. Now, unfortunately, my

colleagues who do this blog are not able

to, you know, they can't continually

maintain the site so you might possibly

find broken links but, in any case, I'm

terribly sorry it didn't work, but it's a

very, very useful resource that I wanted

you to be sure to point you to and it

will work if you go to the AMIR link

and type in alphabetical in the search box

you'll find it and maybe you're doing it

by yourself now I know that Dale also

mentioned HathiTrust and I don't know

what specifically she said about it when

she spoke to you guys but I wanted to be

sure to point out that in addition to

HathiTrust, there is an emergency

temporary access that HathiTrust has

enabled as a result of the COVID-19

situation and uh I noticed that UCLA

did a survey of the materials in its

own print collections versus the titles

that are held in HathiTrust and found

that there is a 50% overlap between our

holdings and HathiTrust and UCLA

catalog holdings. So what this means is

that books that were not available as

ebooks or were digitized and in Hathi

Trust but were still in copyright and

the digitizing library was not UCLA, and

this is a bit into the weeds of library

science, but it means that temporary

access has been offered to UCLA for

these in copyright titles and you can

find them by searching directly in Hathi

Trust. So this is the interface, now I've

logged in as me from Yale, but the

behavior should

be the same for you. The advice is when

you get to the HathiTrust landing page,

what you want to do, is you want to do

you can certainly use the white search

box and see what you get but I really

recommend a little bit more

sophisticated approach to choose

advanced catalog, search at the beginning,

it makes your search more precise, please

don't timeout on me, please don't timeout on

me, there we go, hooray! Okay, I just

thought as an example I would try to

look at the History of the Arabs because

that's such a classic work and it was

something that we had. So you notice what

I did I I used advanced search I put the

author as, which is a known term, and I

put the title in the title search like

that

and I'm then, I'm going to click and I'll

get a couple of results on only one of

which is full view. Now what that means

is that is full view to me at Yale. This

result could be slightly different for

you from UCLA because you may own

different editions of this work in your

own collection. You notice that like I

me from Yale I cannot view the entire

text of this one I can only do a search

for it because it was published in 1937

so it is still in copyright but if I

were to choose something that I can

actually view the text I click on full view this

1951 Edition I am able to view the

entire text and use it, you know, it

happens that the History the Arabs does

exist as an e-book that can be purchased

from a publisher. We have the e-book at

Yale I didn't check to see if you guys

had it at UCLA but in any case it's nice

to know that there's more than one way

to access things right now. So I just

wanted to highlight that aspect of

HathiTrust. I going to close these windows

because I think that that might help with

with my connectivity. OK. The Internet

Archive. I know that Dale talked to you

guys about this also on Monday. Internet

Archive is

for librarians. It's a bit problematic

although we are aware that the

students and the faculty discover

materials in here all the time. For a, a

little bit, the reasons why it's

problematic basically have to do with

copyright and the approach of the

Internet Archive to materials that

are in copyright. It's very easy to find

lots of writing about why people are mad

about the Internet Archive and its

emergency library. This is just one

example of a recent news story, this was

published in the throes of our current

crisis, as you can see, just in early

April. So if you're actually interested

in understanding why librians have

been a bit reluctant to sort of sell the

Internet Archive to you even though you

find materials there on your own and

everybody says oh I found it in Internet Archive

all the time..

This explains a little bit why we find

it so problematic so let me see, get rid of

that, back to Internet Archive. You may

also know that this is a way to search

for older versions of websites or

defunct websites. Yesterday and this

morning it was a bit of a kerfuffle on

Twitter about the disappearance of the

Encyclopaedia Iranica Online and it has

been oops let's see. In order to look for old

websites you've got to give it the URL.

You can't use keyword searching in order

to find things, so that's something to

remember about the Wayback Machine and

it shows me how many times the

Encyclopedia Iranica has been

archived and I can, at least

theoretically, view, let me see, this is

2020 so look how many times it was

archived. Every time you see a great big

blue blob it indicates a time that that

website was crawled. So that is something

interesting about the Wayback Machine

and then the Internet Archive itself I

tried again our friend Hitti History

of the Arabs and I just wanted to show

you this. You'll see, (coughs) excuse me, there are

a number of versions of this text

that represent different editions. You know,

different publication years as you can

see over here on the left. I always think

it's interesting some of these are in

that emergency temporary National

Library and those are the seven

described as available to borrow because

that is the principle on which the

Emergency National Library is working

that they are books that you borrow. You

actually check these out when you go to

the item in the in the Internet Archive

it will say... I don't want to mess up

my connection. Eventually it comes up

with a little button that says here we

go

login and borrow and you can borrow it

for 14 days but then there's all these

other ones that are just always there.

Always available and I always think it's

interesting to have a look at some of

these. So like this one when you look at

these books in Internet Archive... come along,

there's information below that it

indicates where these things came from

and who put them here and I I just find

that really interesting. So this

particular copy of Hitti's History of

the Arabs was put into the Internet

Archive by someone who identifies

themselves as al-Tariq al-Bahrani

and then you get to see, if you click

there, what else this person, what else

this contributor is interested in. I

just find that a fun game to play with

this. So that you understand these are

individuals basically that are putting,

you know, their personal copies or copies

they borrowed from somebody else into this

resource. So now we know other things

that @bahrani_history_ is interested in.

And as I say this, this can be a

source of additional things that you

might not have known about for just a

source of endless amusement and fun so

there's that okie-dokie. Digital

collections are very important for you

guys. The fact of the matter is, as

you've probably already discovered, not

everything is online. In fact, not even

10% of everything is online, it might be

1% of everything, even if that, is online.

UCLA has this fabulous International

Digital Ephemera Project and I just had

a quick look at this before

talking to you. I always search

on Egypt because it's such a, I lived, I

lived in Egypt a long time and it's such

a productive term for searching

when I just want to show something,

just want to figure out what's in this

resource. So these are all items that

have been digitized that are in UCLA

collections and that you can access

remotely and when you look at the

separate things you'll see they come

from separate subcollections. So some of

you may be familiar with the Tahrir

Square documents collection that is

housed at UCLA and then there are other

collections that are all sort of folded

into this. So this is, again, this is a

UCLA based resource that is available

for you and pretty much every other

research library has similar digital

collections we have a big one at Yale

and, you know, I'm more than happy to help

you guys with your particular research

projects to identify where you might be

able to find digital collections that

can be helpful to you. Let me see, ok. So

now I'm going to go on to some things

that, what you're looking at right now is

is the research guide that I have put

together for my job at Yale. There is

a similar guide like this put together

by the librarians at UCLA that are related

to Near East Studies. I'm going to focus

on things here that are actually open

access so that, I'm not sure if these are

on the UCLA subject guides, but they are

open to you, they're not restricted to

Yale and if they're not on the UCLA

subject guides you can come over to my

guide and mine it for whatever is useful

to you so please feel free to do so. Many

of these that are on this page are

actually licensed so UCLA may also have

access to these but you won't have

access to UCLA's instance through my

guide you'll only you know you will be

prevented because it will point to

Yale's access but having said all of

that at the very bottom of so this is

the front page getting started with

research if you go scroll Scroll scroll

away to the bottom there's this thing. So

Ginny was just talking about the

difficulty of Arabic language OCR; in

in the mid-aughts, as we say, in

approximately 2005, Yale embarked on a

really ambitious project and it was

pretty much a proof of concept, to create

a resource. It contains a quarter million

pages of full-text Arabic language

scholarly journals. Now I've discovered

that this project, I don't know why, it was

not very well publicized and I, I really

don't know how much use its ever gotten

but it still exists and this is another

thing I want to talk about with regard

to all of these online resources is this

concept of precarity. So a resource

like Arabic Collections Online that

Ginny talked about has a certain

stability built in because of the nature

of the partners that were involved in it.

That resource it's very unlikely that.

you know. it's going to go away this year

for sure. I mean it's definitely there

for quite a while but there are other

projects that are taking on a lot of

fanfare and a lot of excitement and then

are not sustained and, unfortunately,

AMEEL was one of them. Now, it's it's kind

of limping along and it is still

available in full text so it is, gosh, I

forgot, I think it's about 22 scholarly

journals in Arabic that are included in

this resource. Now ignore the first

paragraph, just right here, it says "new

AMEEL" is what you want.

That's our, you'll see, our Yale's catalog

looks very much like UCLA's and this is

the search page. I don't recommend

searching in it right now because, as I

say, the, it was up until about six months

ago still full-text searchable in Arabic

script, so you could actually type in a

string in Arabic script and get back

results from within articles of these

journals. It's not working right now,

I was promised that it would be an

upgrade to software and it would be

working by December but right now I

don't think that's even going to happen

I think we got to wait a little bit

longer but in the meantime, you can still

at least, browse the journals and so this

is the list of the journals, you'll see

some of them are actually in French or

English but

these are various scholarly periodicals

published in Arab countries, in Arabic

speaking countries, and you can, if you

just explode the tree a little bit you

can actually look at each issue. So as I

say, um they're, there, underneath this

there used to be working OCR. It's

not working right now, but I want you to

know about it because I hope that in the

future the OCR will work and as I

said in the meantime there are not many

places to go for Arabic language

scholarly journals that you can actually

look at online so I just wanted to be

sure to tell you about that. So that's

AMEEL. And let me see go. Okay a little

bit more I wanted to talk about from my own

guide, let me see, I have links to news

resources in a particularly tab so again,

I'm only going to talk to you about the

things that that you can also look at

not things that are restricted to Yale.

One of the most important things I think

for anyone who's interested in newspapers,

this is, newspapers are the most

difficult reference question I ever get,

but the, there are many ways to answer

the question 'how can I find newspapers

for, you know, a particular country?' on the

Center for Research Libraries in Chicago

is an extremely useful repository that,

you cannot go to the UCLA catalog or the

Yale catalog, or any other library catalog

and do a search on newspapers Egypt,

that's not going to work. What you'll get

back is things that are about newspapers

in Egypt and then that way you can learn

what the newspapers titles are but you

can't actually get to whatever the

library may hold that are actually

newspapers published in Egypt for

example. But the CRL catalog, you can

actually do this, if you click on browse

you see how they have Serials and

Newspapers so I can actually click on

this tab Newspapers and I can select a

country here so I can say, oh I don't

know, let's, let's try Iraq, what what

newspapers have they got from Iraq?

I'm just winging it here, click on the

arrow here and it comes back with the

list by city showing what newspapers it has,

So it has 39 newspapers from Baghdad and you

click and you can see what's available

and some of these have been digitized.

You'll have to sort of ferret around in

order to figure that out. The majority of

the whole things of CRL are available on

microfilm.

So when interlibrary loan is once again

permitted, and I'm not sure when that's

going to be, you can request this

microfilm through your interlibrary loan

services and you can also request to

have specific issues digitized. CRL

accepts digitization requests on demand

and they will digitize the newspaper and

make it available on through their own

catalogue so again that's a tool I think

a lot of people don't really know much

about that is super super useful on

particularly for graduate students who

want to use news resources for their

research. There's a lot of other stuff I

could say about newspapers but I don't

want to bore you and my time is running

out. Let me see, what is the other thing?

Oh, let me see. There's a number of things

here that are in fact open access on,

this one is in Persian. I focused a lot

on Arabic, not so much on other languages.

This is an interesting project from the

University of Manchester to provide

digital, digitized Persian newspapers and

they have curated by topics. So you see,

you know, collections of these papers that

portray Iran in the 50s, um let me see,

Iran during the late 1990s. So these are

on various collections, they're very

interesting to look at, but it's still a

little challenge to use because they are

not searchable. You have to just go in

and read each one. I'm not going to risk

clicking on the link but I just

recommend as I say you can google

Nashriva (University of Manchester) because

it's open access, it'll come up or if you

can find your way back again to my

research guide here and click on news

resources you'll find it that way. Let me

see, I want to be sure to make a shout

out to two librarians in the UC system

that

you guys can also lean on so one of them

is my colleague Heather Hughes who is at

University of California at Santa

Barbara. Heather is a resource for you

and also my colleague Mohamed Hamed who

is at UC Berkeley. These guys are, as I

say, they're both in the UC system,

they're familiar with UC system

resources and they can both be of

assistance to you. If you feel free to

reach out to anybody, really, and we will,

we're all ready to help to do ever we

can, so with that I better stop

and I'll stop sharing and return the

controls to Professor Behdad. Thank

you very much for those great

presentations they were incredibly

helpful and I know our students will

reach out to you. In the meantime I'd like

to thank our two wonderful speakers for

so generously sharing their insights and

knowledge with us this afternoon.