My name is Ali Behdad and I am 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 UCLA
Center for Near Eastern Studies have organized
a series of fora
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.
Today's forum will focus on digital
resources available
at UC system. I'm pleased to introduce
three
distinguished librarians in this panel
who will share their knowledge
of online resources and offer advice for
doing research during these
challenging times. Our first speaker
is Iman Dagher, who is the Arabic and
Islamic Studies Catalog
Librarian at UCLA. Prior to coming to
UCLA, she worked
for ProQuest, served as the head
librarian for the Lebanese National
Library
Rehabilitation Project, and was a
librarian at the American University of
Beirut
and the Lebanese University. She received
her Master's degree in Library and
Information Studies from the
Loughborough University of Technology in
England,
and a second Master's degree in Library
Science
(Digital Librarianship) from Wayne State
University in Michigan.
She has been the Arabic NACO
Funnel co-coordinator since 2013
and an active member of the Middle
Eastern Librarian Association (MELA),
serving now as a member-at-large on the
Executive Board.
She is also an active member of the
Program for Cooperative Cataloging
and serving on several committees. She
has given many presentations at American
Library Association conferences,
Special Library Association, Gulf Chapter,
and MELA conferences. She has organized and co-
presented cataloging workshops at
MELA, the American University of Beirut
in Lebanon
and Bibliotheca Alexandria in Egypt. Her
research interests include authority
control, identity management, and catalog
non-latin materials. Our second speaker
is Heather Hughes. She holds an M.A. in
Middle Eastern Studies from the
University of Washington
and a Master of Information Studies from
the University of Texas.
She's an editor of Hazine and has worked
as a processing archiver
for the [Shiraza Hedi Collection] at the
Hoover Archives
and as librarian for Middle Eastern
Studies,
Global Studies, and Comparative
Literature at UCSB.
She will start as the Middle Eastern
Middle East Studies Librarian at
University of Pennsylvania
in August; congratulations Heather
on your new position. Our last speaker
is Dr. Mohamed Hamed, who joined the
University of California Berkeley
Library in 2017
as the Middle Eastern and Near Eastern
Studies Librarian.
He formerly was the Middle Eastern and
African Studies Librarian
in the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.
Dr. Hamed earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in
Library and Information Science from
Cairo University
and his previous professional
affiliations include the American
University in Cairo,
Santa Monica College Library and Arabic
language instructions at UNC Chapel Hill.
Professionally, Dr. Hamed has participated in several key
organizations, including the Middle East
Librarian Association,
the Africana Librarians Council, and the
Arab
Federation for Libraries and Information.
He's active publishing and presenting on
the library usage,
particularly for the Middle East and
area studies resources,
in the U.S. Please join me in welcoming
these three distinguished librarians to
the panel. Hello everyone, thank you Dr.
[Behdad] for inviting me to present on this
forum. It is my pleasure
to be here today. In my work as the UCLA
Catalogue Librarian for Arabic and
Islamic Studies,
the main aspect of my job is focused on
describing resources
that our library collects so it will be
discovered
in our catalogue by students and
researchers on campus and around the
world.
So my scope might be a little bit
different than my colleagues Mohamed
and Heather. So my intention at this
presentation is really try to discuss
some of the behind the scenes
of how materials are described and entered
in our catalog,
and the best way to search the catalog
in order to find what we need.
My work is really heavily based on rules
and standards
but I'll try my best to avoid using the
technical, technical terminology
during my, uh, my presentation but I will
start to
to with while one page and talk a little
bit about some of the current services
available right now.
If you haven't done so yet, I really
recommend
checking this page with a called Explore
Remote Resources and Services, in this,
this page include all the information
needed for, for
resources, uh, that might help you, uh
during, uh, during this time while, uh, the
physical
library space is not available. The
information there ranges
from technical, uh, assistance on how to
set off
the campus access to online collection
and research pool,
to how to schedule remote search
consultation with subject librarian.
Also, there are some good information
about workshop that
are available right now, research
workshop so that's a good,
good page to start.
If you haven't, also, one very convenient
service that has started really recently
earlier this month called the Pilot
Emergency Temporary Digitization On
Request (PETDOR). This service focus on
published book chapters and journal, art,
articles and the library general print
collection.
The prior, priority right now is for,
is for the graduate students who have
some deadline with research it does not,
however,
cover the manuscript special collections,
audio visual materials, and other
non-print collect, collection.
So back to our library page. This page
can be really your starting point and
can guide you
to where to go depending on the
resources that you need.
If you're looking for a specific
database that is related to your
search,
this is the the good starting point, uh,
You can either search your database that
you need or
browse within the list available. If
you're looking for specific
articles then maybe ArticlesPlus could
be a good start
among other links, uh, to, to access
articles.
Also there are some links to audio and
images and primary resources,
resources. The library research guides
are available,
uh, at the bottom of the page but
accessing
access to uh the library catalog we have
three options. As you may know the UCLA
library catalog,
uh, the Melvyl, which is a UC joint
catalog and the Worldcat,
which cover libraries across
the world. With the, with the UCLA library
catalog, Melvyl, and Worldcat
you have the option either to search a
basic, to do a basic search
or to do advanced search, where you have
more options
to limit and refine your search options.
In your research and study, uh, you may
deal with
many non-Roman materials such as Arabic,
Persian,
Hebrew, and so on. When cataloging these
materials,
we, the cataloguers, enter the transcribed
information of the book in a romanized
form
and what I meant in transcribed
information: title,
author, publication, statement, addition
statement
and we use for that the ALA-LC
Romanization Tables.
Getting to know the, the, the Romanization
Table is very important and
it will help you on research. Some
Romanization issue for Arabic language
that you might encounter when you do the,
uh, or the search,
lack of consistency in catalog, lack of
consensus
on certain words and names also there
are different tables and schema that are
available in our shared catalog
since not everyone used the ALA-LC
Romanization Table.
Pronunciation may vary among
different regions and communities
and for Arabic the knowledge of grammar
is important and specifically for titles.
Also there is a lack of Tashkil, of, or
vocalization in our resources
and that might have a big effect
specifically if you're searching
for proper names and
personal names.
Some tips for you to search Romanization
try different Romanization forms. If you
have dawliyah, try dawliyah or duwaliyah,
mahrajan or mihrajan, Masri or Misri.
Sometimes the display of hamzah is not
consistent
in the publication, try Ifrigiya or Afriqiya.
For personal name this is specifically
challenging so try the
different Romanization of the personal name.
For Hamid try Hamid or Humayyid, Hasani or Husni.
also it's important to understand the
context of the word
so Mahkamat could be Mahkamat or Mahkamah or Muhakkamah.
A'lam could be A'lam or I'lam.
When in doubt consult a dictionary.
Hans Wehr is one of the top references that
we consult when,
when, for, with Romanization. But most
importantly, scripts are available in
many records.
So searching in the script can be really
your ultimate solution.
Catalogers provide two kind of
description when they get when they do
cataloging.
There is the physical description, which
cover
the title, the author, publication
pagination,
illustration, language of, or languages of,
the book,
and whether the, the, the book is a
translation or not
and they do also uh discuss the content
of the book
or cover the content on the book and
that would be
displayed in a call number subject
headings, keyword,
or abstract. Also they provide access
point otherwise known as
headings. These are specific information
or labels taken from a controlled list
by which user
can search query the catalog and locate
what they need.
Access point can be a personal name if
you're searching for author,
translators, editors, etc. and can be also
for [corporate body],
such as issuing body that it that is
related to the
work you're searching for. It could be
for conference name
and for some specific titles and series
as well as subject.
Taking this access point from controlled
list is important because it helps in
the disambiguation
and collocation of the catalog function.
For example,
searching for a common name may bring up
the wrong person or several
wrong persons. Using a controlled list
help and disambiguation between two or
more
identical names for different people. For
the example of
the name of Muhammad Abd al-Salam in this
slide.
Researcher may have different knowledge
of the name Avicenna, no matter what the
search
for the name is and in which language
all will be
will be collocated under the one taken
form
Avicenna 980-1037.
Also for subject people can express the
name
things differently and name things
differently for example for the subject
of the political unrest
that started in 2011 in Syria people can
express it in a different way
by using term from a controlled list any
search under these different variants
will be directed with a SEE reference
toward
the one standardized form that is Syria -
History - Civil War, 2011.
Gilgamesh poem has been known and
published under so many titles and name.
All these variants will be linked to the
authorized form
and used in the access point for
translation.
If you're looking for a specific
translation
you can just add Arabic or whatever
language you're looking for
and after the title.
Example of the controlled list are the
Library of Congress
name, Authority File for name, names, and
titles, and LC subject headings for
subject term.
The lists are provided by the Library of
Congress Authority File.
Consulting this page will direct you to
the assigned form of a name,
title, or subject.
In some instance it can be challenging
to identify
or verify some individual name
especially for
classical author and in some cases for
modern author as well.
In addition to searching the reference
book, the Virtual
International Authority File (VIAF) could be
another source to consult,
especially since it is a national,
international service that combined
many national authority files from all
around the world.
So searching for, in the VIAF, for Abu Firas al-Hamdani
will bring us like a super authority
file with all
the different form of Abu Firas al-Hamdani from all
the national library from around the
world.
Also it will provide in addition to that
some alternate names of, of,
of the name of Abu Firas al-Hamdani as they might
have been occurred
uh on publication and resources. As well
as all the titles that are related to
Abu Firas al-Hamdani or written by Abu Firas al-Hamdani
so this is a really it could be a good
source.
In addition to the to the VIAF, you
could try Wikipedia also
if it has some good article about Abu
Firas al-Hamdani or
the individual author you're looking for
also it will have in addition to the
information you might use
a good, a good section at the bottom
called authority control
it includes all the identifier to the
specific list
that has entry for the for the, uh
author you're looking for in my case to
Abu Firas al-Hamdani
and as you can see here it has the link
to the Library of Congress
Authority File. So, so this could be a
good a good source to consult when
you need to sort names for different
authors.
Searching by subject can be the pathway
to discovery,
uh, to discovering the resources we need
for a library.
Cataloguers really spend a good amount
of time to understand the subject
or the book or more than one subject
and assign the relevant subject headings
so it can be discovered by users
as well also to help the user select
and decide what they need from the
selection offered by the library catalog.
So getting to know the language and
terminology
used by the subject search can really
help you
and there are different type of subject
headings. Subject headings could be a one
word,
two words or more, it can be narrowed by
qualifier,
and sometimes we can use, if there is no
english term to express
the concept or the topic, some foreign
term can be also
used in the in the Library of Congress
subject heading and
in our case we have Waqf, Takfir, Basmalah,
and others.
Subdivision are also another important
part of the Library of Congress subject
headings
and they are added to the main subject
to combine various aspects of a
topic into one heading and narrow down
your search
and there are different type of
subdivision as you can see on the slide.
So why do we search by subject? Most
library users rely on simple keyword
search
when looking for items in the library
and although this may work
well in some cases, it often provide
either too many irrelevant result or too
few relevant one.
It will miss synonyms, variant spelling,
variant phrases, and different languages
and this especially when you do a full
text search.
If you're doing a catalog search not all
titles
represent the topic of the book well.
So relying on subject headings could be
really,
uh, the ultimate. It could help
retrieve resources that might have been
missed with a keyword search.
So in the coming slide I will try to
demonstrate a few examples on the use of
Library of Congress subject heading in
our library search.
So I did some, uh, screenshot
hoping that this would help uh to
demonstrate the case.
So in the case number one, uh, the, the
user said
'Do how do we have materials in Akkadian
language in our library?' and the Library
of Congress subject heading
we have a subdivision
called text and we use this under lesser
known
language or some early period languages
languages and dialects.
So using this search in the subject list
I added the Akkadian language,
which fit into that, that, that
model and I use text. I did this in a
subject list starting off from our UCLA
catalog
and we do have lots of, uh, materials
about the subject and actually looking
at,
at the different subjects available the
users can
select and see how narrow they want the
search.
In case number two, the user said I have
a class to teach and I need some text in
Armenian languages
and we do have a subject heading called
readers.
Readers is used under
reading text for learning purposes.
That's easy just adding Armenian
language and
readers and we have 12 titles in our
library
that that correspond to the search
search question.
Case number three, the user
wants some selection of Arabic poetry
but for some reason
he or she want them to be published, want
the publication to be published in
Beirut, Lebanon.
So this is an anthology. Anthology is a
little bit harder because
there are no subjects assigned to this
kind of materials.
Unlike the UCLA catalog,
Melvyl have this option to search
under genre.
So searching with, guessing what's the
title,
since, we, there's no individual author
that the the user is interested in,
trying to guess what could be the word
available in the title we could use
selection,
work, compilation, I use Mukhtarat since
the user is interested in Arabic
materials, added
the genre poetry, and I added Beirut as
place of publication and we do have 25
results in our
in in Melvyl and it could be
available in UCLA or other UC system or
worldwide
that could could be beneficial for the
user.
Now in this case the user needs titles
of manuscript of poetry on Arabic
grammar.
We used the subject search in that case
using Arabic language grammar. Limit
and refine the search by poetry and
then
to cover the manuscript part we have the
option
to limit, to limit our search by
manuscript only
and we have 64 results that they are
poem or poetry in Arabic.
This question has been referred to us by
one of the graduate student
Syriac related resources in Arabic this
is quite
broad subject so I put in this slide
some of the subject that they could be
relevant
to this to this search.
And all these subdivisions are options
that
that they can add to the Syriac language
or Syriac Language, Modern.
We can add the Arabic language limit to
the search results.
This is another, another question that
has been referred to us Language
ideologies, language and identity.
Some suggested Library of Congress
subject heading to be used in that
with helpful would be Sociolinguistic,
Languages and contact,
and, and so on. Sometimes we can combine
more than one subject heading
to get what we need if there's a
specific ethnic group that
we're interested in then add the, the
ethnic group
plus subdivision ethnic identity and add
another subject heading 'language and
culture.'
Also we can use the subdivision language
under places and ethnic group,
Palestinian Arabs--languages and that
might be
relevant to this search.
Some research focuses on arguments and
debate especially with religious studies
to locate such publication
we can try searching the subdivision
controversial literary literature
for resources that depict content
attacking, criticizing against the
religion
or sacred world. On the other hand we can
also use
apologetic works for resources defending
the religion
and I did the search for Shi'ah Apologetic
works and Shi'ah controversial work
and we have lots of results
that correspond to those two searches
and actually some of them are available
in the Hathi Trust
now with the with the temporary access,
uh, during this time.
Searching literature,
we have so many options. So we can add
the history and criticism if it's a
critical,
if it's a critical, if we're looking for
some
critical materials
to the main individual literature.
If we're looking for more of the text or
the style we can add criticism
and textual.
If the researcher need a criticism for
specific person active in literature
then criticism and interpretation will
be our choice.
We have some option for looking for an
influence of some influences of some
civilization on literature and we have
many examples here.
If we need specific author that are
writing on
on the individual literature we add
the, the, the type of author in addition
to the individual literature such as
women author, lebanese author, and so on
and also we can combine a topic and the
literature.
If if we're talking if about the
relationship between a topic and
and and the literature that's really
really very common
in in our in literary work.
Sometimes there are books that they
represent
they discuss the representation of a
topic in a literature
in that case we can add the topic if
it's available in the LC subject
headings
in literature like secularism and
literature.
By combining this with the individual
literature,
we, we can bring together both aspects
the type or the language of the
literature plus
the topic that has been discussed in
this kind of literature.
So what I have presented here is a very
small selection
on how to benefit from the metadata
provided in the catalog in order
to get what we need, but getting to know
one's library catalog more
can reveal more valuable hidden
resources for research.
Thank you for your time and attention.
Okay, um, thanks Iman, and, um,
thank you Ali for organizing this, um, and
Christian for your help.
Okay.
All right, thanks everyone for joining
virtually, um,
I was thinking to share something,
share what is kind of relevant for
Middle East Studies from UCSB
Special Collections and resources that I
don't think are maybe as widely known
about as they could be
and since we also got a question about
music
I'm hoping that this would be relevant
for that person.
Um, so I'm here at the UCSB Special
Research Collections page
and there's a bit of a description of
all the different collections that are
here.
I could certainly see the American
Religious, Religions Collection being
useful for
um for Middle East Studies folks as well.
um
And I'm gonna go to the Performing Arts,
which is where our, um, our historical
recordings are. They're
kind of described and there's a bit of
information about those.
So UCSB Library has around 250,000
audio recordings in a variety of formats
including
cylinders and 78s (rpm)
and the cylinders is really a
fascinating project
but probably the 78s are going to have
more of the kind of Middle East,
as well as like, kind of Greek Rebetiko
music.
So a good way to kind of check that out
is to
check out these pages about some of the
different
collections. So
within these like kind of sub
collections that have been brought
into the library, there's sometimes a bit
of information about the collector
and, um, their interests as well as kind
of a breakdown of,
um, of the collections. So here, for
example,
is, um, a bit of information about Benno
Haulpl,
um, a notable music collector and we also
have a bit of a breakdown
of, um, of languages within the collection
and also the sort of genres and
types of music that he sought out for
his collection.
So one way to find
these records is to search, um,
search within the catalog by artist or
song, but I think another way to kind of,
um, to kind of browse the collection
is to, um,
is to, you can actually browse by
collection. So by clicking on the UCSB
Library search from there it
basically brought up everything within
the Benno Haupl collection,
um, and here we see that
about 4,000 of those records have been
catalogued. So cataloging is kind of
ongoing for this massive 10,000 record
collection. And you can see here
different subject headings that you
could browse by,
as well as, different languages. So, um,
so let's see, um.
If I was to click on Turkish, or Arabic,
or Greek, it would basically show me all,
um,
all the records for, for that language,
um, and
well the search is being a bit slow
so I'm not going to mess with that but,
um, let's say we wanted to,
um, to look at this record from Tashkent,
um, we would open
this up and, um,
request a, um,
a digital copy through this Special
Research Collections portal.
So you would create like a non, if you're
a UCSB
affiliate you would use this. If you're
not, you would create an account here and
you could
request a digital copy. Um, sometimes
there are
fees associated with digitizing
materials and
I'm also not sure what, what the plan is
in terms of digitizing materials
in Special Collections during the
pandemic so, um,
I would encourage reaching out to
staff in that department if you're
wanting to use those materials,
um, but it's just like, it's just been
endlessly fun for me to
use this collection for different
projects like radio shows,
and it's, it's really great.
Um, in terms of
digital resources for music that are
based out of UCSB,
one of those is the Discography of
American Historical Recordings project
so, um, it's basically a database
of musical recordings that provides some,
some nice data about, um,
about artists, performers and, um, and
discs,
um, and there is,
um, there is digital material that you
can listen to you can kind of see
this black recording here so that means
that it's available for online listening
so,
um, and again it's kind of easy to
browse by language.
So this is just showing the recordings
that are available to listen to not
necessarily everything that's
documented, um, within this database
and, um, musical recordings are something
that I really enjoy and I
follow a number of interesting digital
archives and blogs about that so if
you're
interested in kind of talking about that,
um, I would encourage you all to reach
out to me.
Let's see...
And...
A wider California resource that I
wanted to talk about a bit
is Calisphere. So this is open access
and anyone can use it but I think it's
something that
people, folks in California should be
aware of because it basically
is a portal that pulls together,
um, all the kind of digital collections
of the UC and actually, um, all the
libraries and
contributing institutions within the
state. So it's just like a really
convenient way
to look for things rather than going to
different individual
library websites and, um, like,
so this is a, um,
a UC initiative but you can see here all
the different libraries that are
contributing to this including, um, Hoover
Archives,
Stanford Libraries, different public
libraries as well. So it's
quite a massive list and, um
something that I've, um, been able to,
um, kind of see that there's a lot of
materials about is particularly, like,
diaspora populations
in California so I think this is a
really great resource for that.
Speaking of music we can see some nice,
um,
choir photos here when I did a search
for Armenian
and we can see here kind of like the
breakdown of
types of material that are being shown
as well as
the different contributing institutions
and
what we can see, from example, for Hoover
Archive, there's some sound recordings
but also they have
a quite notable, like, political poster
collection.
So that's one way to access that.
That is, yeah, as you can see
there's materials from a number of
institutions here, um,
such as Los Angeles Public Library, um,
California State University, Fresno,
and so on. So I think that's quite
good to know for folks in California
and really everywhere else.
Also wanted to talk a bit about the
Online Archive of California,
which is maybe not the best place to
look for on
digitized materials although digitized
materials do show up
in this. It's basically a, um,
a database of finding aids from all the
different
repositories in the state of California
and so if I was to do a search for
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, it would show me
all the different finding aids and which
institutions have materials
related to this person and if you see
this little eye
here, it means that there are some online
items
available, um, so just one, um,
but then I could find that within the
finding aid,
um, so
but again like Iman was talking about
earlier that transliteration can
definitely, um,
affect like the results. So when I did
this search again
with of like Mohammed with an 'e' instead
of an 'a' it kind of
brought up sort of a, some of the same
but some different results
so, um, I want to, you know,
encourage you all to follow Iman's
advice and also I just,
when I'm doing research I like to just
try different spellings
and make sure I'm getting all different
possibilities, um,
particularly in cases where it's not
controlled, um.
Okay and moving on to a bit more
kind of UC
and institutional specific items. Um,
I wanted to talk a little bit about
HathiTrust because
I know that, that was demoed to you all
in previous
presentations and, um, since I'm in between
institutions I don't actually
have an institutional login at the
moment so I can't demo it even if I
wanted to,
um, but it's particularly
helpful for folks at UC because,
uh, you you can access basically anything
that's within
the print holdings of a UC Library.
Um, so it's just really amazing that, you
know,
it's pretty good odds that if something
is not at your institution that
another one of the UCs has something and
that you can access that through that. So,
um,
I'm sure you all are being directed to
that a lot, um,
with your, with your questions regarding
[ILL]
but I just really wanted to hammer that
point home: that it's
a really amazing resource for
UC affiliates.
Something else that I think might be
helpful for
Middle East historians, um, and this is
a, um, this is kind of like,
these are, uh, resources that you need an
institutional affiliation and login
to get to, uh, these items with keys mean
that yeah you need to use like a
your login, um, and basically what we're
at here
is the British History library guide
from the UCLA Library
that has been compiled by
I believe the, the history liaison
librarian for UCLA.
Um, and this is British History but I, I,
happen to know that a number of these
resources
have, um, have Middle East related content
so looking at the, um, Adam Matthew's
Empire Online, um, probably some of these
Early English Books Online,
and um the British Periodicals too,
um, definitely has quite a lot of Middle
East content. Um,
again I would have logged in to show but,
uh, I can't but
suffice it to say that these are, um, like
full-text search, um, resources
that you can use as you would on kind of
any
database, um. So I would encourage you to
check those out and also to
to reach out for help if you think you
could maybe use some assistance in
optimizing your search.
Um, but
yeah, there are various tabs here such as
really to different centuries,
um, there's also this Newspapers, um,
and then the government info so all of
those might have primary resources that
could help
doing, um, Middle East history. Yes, one
more thing that I wanted to point out,
um, so we did get
a question for, um, about Syriac
manuscripts and, um,
one thing I found that I thought would
be helpful for that person,
um, as you can see I just googled 'Syriac
studies libguide,'
um, is this Princeton Library, uh,
library guide, which, um, has a number
of resources, including,
um, a manuscripts tab and I would say
that these are
some of the collections that I probably
would have sent that person to so I'm
hoping that, that,
that person who asked this question will
maybe find, um, some of the resources
listed here
helpful I know particularly, um, Mill
Museum and Manuscript Library
has a number of Syriac manuscripts, um,
and I think I've said all I want to say
at the moment. I'll pass things on to my
colleague Mohamed, but I just want to
reiterate what a number of other people
have said on these
panels, which is that, um, we're all happy
to help, um, so don't hesitate to reach
out to us and I think
because not every institution has a
Middle East Studies librarian,
um, we're kind of used to taking
questions from people,
um, outside our institution, um,
so don't, so yeah, don't be shy.
Okay, hello everyone, um, thank you, uh,
Heather and Iman for this introduction. I
really, uh,
enjoyed listening to both of you and I
took so many notes
from your presentations as well, uh,
the, uh, what I actually will, will talk
about today is
some unique resources that are available
in, uh,
the UC system and also speaking about
unique resources I will also speak about
the, uh, some of the resources that are
available in,
uh, UCLA. So speaking about that
is definitely the manuscript collection,
which is really a great collection at
UCLA that definitely you need to,
uh, to benefit from just that collection
being at UCLA,
uh, to speak about the unique resources I
would like to see,
I would like to start with actually, uh,
the
resources that are available in
UC Berkeley, in particular, some of these
are in UC Santa Barbara, some of them are
at UCLA.
So you need to actually use the, um, the
login,
uh, for that but in some cases
for these resources, uh, they are
available only at UC
Berkeley, uh, so in the near future
hopefully when you visit the
library, you can just get inside and use
the resources,
uh, very, um, normally hopefully soon,
uh, to see that. So in my presentation I
will be speaking about
a number of resources here, um,
and I will start with the, uh,
very big database called Almandumah
Database, which is,
uh, mainly for Arabic resources, uh, as far
as I know Almandumah Database is one of
the largest, if not
the largest, database for Arabic
resources including
journals, articles, conference papers,
dissertations, book reviews, and all of
that but not books.
It is available in the Middle East very,
very widely
in all Middle East libraries, I would say,
all I would say,
in particular Arab countries in all
the Arab countries, uh,
because it's kind of the, the big
database that is,
that is used for research in Arabic
resources.
It is, it looks like Elsevier when we
speak about resources,
uh, for, um, the English general resources
and so on
in the U.S. So Almandumah is,
as far as I can tell, as well is only
available at UC Berkeley and
not other libraries in the U.S., uh, has it
until this
moment I believe so, um, so
I would like to share with you what this
looks like and
I hope you can get benefit from it if
you visit UC Berkeley
anytime soon. Uh, so Almandumah Database you
can find this information actually in my
guide where you can go to library,
Berkeley Library find my name under
directory and find it under, or under
subject expertise and you can find my
information,
um, and find my guide and this is
actually the Middle East guide. It's kind
of
kind of similar to what, uh, Heather and
Iman show
for, uh, UCLA, so for this guide you can
just go to articles and primary sources
and in this case I would like you to
click on
Almandumah Database, when this opens
actually this is where it is for the
advanced
search it has an Arabic interface where
you can search anything in Arabic you
can change
the, the, the interface as well to English,
however, you need to search in Arabic.
There are a good number of research in
English in this database so you can also
find English resources there.
So, for example, if I just go for 'harb aleiraq,'
or 'sujun asrayyl,' or 'etyl' or 'eabd allah wanus'
whatever actually these are all questions
that I try to help our students to get
resources from the database
for example if we go to 'harb aleiraq' and we
just, uh,
do search what we get is actually about
2,000
articles or 2,000 entries that has
'harb aleiraq' in them,
um, I would definitely say that most of
these resources are available in so many
journals and
articles in, in many libraries in the U.S.
but we don't know,
uh, because they are all scattered. There
is no specific one index that can
collect everything,
so this database provides that type of
index or whatever is available
and it is there. Sometimes or most of the
times it is actually full text,
for example, we have 2,000 articles here
or 2,000 entries here
if you click on full text when you click
this, this will take you to
about 1,400, which is about two-thirds of
it is all
about 'harb aleiraq' and what is there so some of them
are old, like 'harb aleiraq'
came before it war in Iraq before the,
um, the
the, uh, the recent war that happened, um,
this is another
one here so, for example, if we want to
click on that one here this is where you
can take you to the metadata record
where this came from 'Majalat Alearab Walmustaqbal.'
'Majalat Alearab Walmustaqbal' could be in Yale, could be in Harvard,
could be in, in UCLA,
you can find this information and use it
in your research and find the doc,
copy in your own
in your library, but for the full text
here you can just click
on that on this article you can download
it and you can see
what the article looks like and actually
it's a full article. I don't have time to
to really go through that but the basic
thing here, which is really good thing
that you can add a citation to this
so for example if you like this article
all what you need to do is to click APA
style, Chicago,
MLA style, you can copy this and paste it
in your
work or you can export the citation as
as you like.
So this is just one example of the
resources that is available at UC
Berkeley and
the only one in the U.S. as far as I
can tell at the moment.
The other database that I actually
also would like to highlight here
is for mainly Persian resources. It's
called NoorMags.
NoorMags is another database that is
available
in, I believe, a couple of libraries in
the U.S. right now,
uh, but not so many, it is not in UCLA, um,
but hopefully in the future it will be
added but
in, in terms of how this works actually
this is kind of the same thing
it is basically the, one of the largest
databases for,
uh, Islamic Studies and Humanities in
general for Middle,
for Persian resources, um,
and it has the same functions we can
check or search for, uh, something like,
something like 'mamari' for architecture,
for example,
um, and check how many records we have
for this,
um, in this case we will have,
this is a lot of resources definitely
but
this is, uh, the number of where this, this
word came
in so it's kind of a full text search
and
it is exactly as the other one for Almandumah
but this is for Persian you can select
this one for example, uh, you can see the
full text of this database and you can
see
how how it works. You can download the
PDF, you can also see that it came from
specific journal you can check the
journal for
another year or so, so you can find some
other related resources
that if you find that this journal is
basically what you look for and you can
click and do the same thing
as we did for the, um, for the Middle East
for the, uh,
Almandumah Database, um, I
believe I need to, yeah, click that one,
close this one, yeah, so this, this both of,
both of these actually are for the,
um, uh, are journal articles and
the special resources that are in those
languages, for example, Arabic and Persian
and so on.
So for books we, um, we have
also the, uh, a number of databases that
are available in UCLA
as well, as Berkeley, uh, for example, the
one that is available at UCLA
is, uh, Early Arabic Print, uh, for British
Library when you click on that one
I'm using the UC Berkeley login because,
um, this is where I can actually demo
what I want to say.
So, for example, this is, this is a data-
base this consists of about
more than five thousand, uh, uh, full-text,
uh,
books from, uh, early, uh, print from the
1400 to 1900, uh, in all languages in
Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Ottoman,
Syriac, and so on. So to respond to the
same question that came to us for Syriac
resources in Arabic, or related to Arabic,
I will actually see what we have here.
It's easy, very easy to use,
for example, here by language I will
click on,
try to find Syriac language and
here it is I will just add it to the
search and without searching keyword or
anything I need to see what
is in Syriac so I click search and I find
here
some of results and they are all
in Syriac,
uh, you can see that this is how it looks,
um,
for example, if I click on that one here,
uh,
I don't read this language, unfortunately,
but it seems Syriac to me,
um, so this is how it looks you can
click on the main text you can go to
the full
the full page, you can jump to a specific
page, for example, if I go to page 20, in
this case,
this is how it looks. You can actually
it's very, very, um,
as you see, high resolution. You can zoom
in to the
most or to the maximum, you can get that,
um, this is actually one of the examples
where what for, what you can find here
those are, um, available to,
um, to people, to researchers in UCLA
and
in UC Berkeley and other libraries as
well in the UC system.
The other database is for books as well
because I tried my best to get some
ebooks
for UC users, and UC Berkeley
users in particular, uh, through the
pandemic I was able to get Al Manhal
and also the Digital, uh, Library of Noor
Noor Digital Library for Persian
resources for Al Manhal
it's, uh, it's about 15,000
Arabic, Arabic books that are available
in,
um, in this platform and, uh,
if we want to get, uh, something about,
um, uh, for example,
'thawrat misrana' if we click here this will take
us to, um, these, uh,
these books here you can see that there
are,
uh, many results that came and if for
example if we want to click on that one
here
this will take you to the full text of
that book you can browse it, you can
download it, you can do what you want
with that specific book. So it's called
Almanhal Database. It's available in,
uh, in Berkeley for
any of the researchers in the U.S. in the
in the, uh, in the UC system.
The other database in Persian as well, is,
uh, noor
Noor Digital Library, which is similar to
NoorMags but it's a different platform
and you can see here it's the, the, the
authentication is for the
UC Berkeley and this is for, uh, Berkeley
users as well
so when you are, when you are visiting the
campus
one day in the near future hopefully,
inshallah, we can, you can use that this
database and
this is the same thing if I try to find,
uh, resources about,
uh, um, what I can say here,
um,
'farihan,' '[farihanging],' for
example, if I want to use '[farihange..
bot],'
oops, what is that?
Let's see, art
art you can see the, um, for example this
one here,
uh, you can see the, the text. You can see
the,
um, whatever you want here you can jump
to
pages, you can download things, uh,
and so on. So this is a full text
database of ebooks that
is available for all the reseachers in
the UC system when you visit Berkeley,
um, for, uh,
what else I need to cover with this. Let
me
just go to the list that I want. So we
covered the Almandunah, NoorMags, the Digital
Library, Almanhal,
Early Arabic database, which is, uh, also
at UCLA, um,
yeah so there is a, the platform for, uh,
digital press archive it's also for news
so you can find it in the art, in the
guide as well so when you click,
when you go to the guide here I have my
miss a lot of information here about
news and special databases we have in
Berkeley,
but for, um, us in the UC system in
general, the general
the, the Global News Archive or the
Global Press Archive is
a great resource that has
historical newspapers from the Middle
East,
uh, it goes back to 1800
and part of it is open access to all
members in the center for research
libraries, uh,
and it is actually that what we see
right now
so, uh, when you click here if I
search for example 'thawra' or
whatever keyword that you would like to
search for when you click here this will
take you to
where the word 'thawra' came and how many
times you can see it seventeen thousand
times
and actually it searches about, uh, four,
four, eighty-four, uh, full titles
full newspapers for long runs, uh, some of
them
multiple years and so on, for example,
this one here if I click on
just that first one from al-Akhbar
I can tell that this is how it looks
you can browse the pages you can select
specific page
and you can see what else is said about
this, you know, that it's coming from al-Akhbar
when you click here and this will take
you to the metadata for al-Akhbar itself
and, uh, you can browse other issues from
al-Akhbar so, for example, if I want to move
to,
uh, another date from al-Akhbar it goes from 2006
to 2019 so if I get 2011 for example and
I would like to see what they said about
the revolution in Egypt and I say
February 2011 let's see what they said
about
this and here in the 17s, uh,
let's see what they said about it al-Akhbar so Mstedwn litahrir aljalil
or whatever so you can find other
information but actually this is or this
is basically what you can find in these
resources.
you can browse them they are all very
good, uh, Al-Ahram...
archive is part of this project and it
is at UCLA, however, it is,
it is not a UC Berkeley at this time I'm
working on getting it Al-Ahram
is a very, very, um, important newspaper
that is coming from
Egypt, uh, it is considered one of the
oldest and one of the widest,
widely, uh, distributed, um, newspapers from,
from the Middle East or from Arab
countries in, in, in particular,
uh, it goes to 1800-something as well for
the archive
but it is for, uh, purchasing and
subscription so
UCLA has it, uh, UC Santa Barbara has it
but UC Berkeley is not so I can't really
show it to you right now but it could be
it is actually exactly similar to this
what I'm showing you here. The good thing
about Global Press Archive
is very important feature
which is OCR so you can
find resources and you can find articles
and
news stories from just searching the
full text
so it goes to the full text and it has
OCR, for example, if you click on text
here
this will take you to the text where
this
is and actually you can find it here so
crowdsourcing or data harvesting
is possible however i would say that the
accuracy rate is,
uh, in some cases for especially for old
newspapers is not that accurate
or is not that very high but they are
working on it
the the provider and CRL are working on
enhancing
it, um, you can find very good results for
the recent,
uh, newspapers for the other ones it's, um,
sum and some so you can just get it from
that
aspect so, uh, with that,
uh, I would like also to speak about the
digital
library uh digital Middle East
Digital Library for Middle East it is a
great resource as well,
uh, that is available for, um,
everyone because it's open access
and it is this database or it is
actually this platform
and this platform works as a union
catalog it's not like they
collect resources and they digitize them,
uh,
probably they do but actually in most of
it, it, is, is the
union catalog for many libraries around
the world they have their own,
uh, digital collections like UCLA and
others,
um, National Library of Qatar and
Stanford University. It's kind of a
collaborative work they collect all
these metadata for these resources they
have the links to them
so you can click on any of these ones
you can select by language
you can select by period of time,
for example, if we go here for Arabic,
you can see that there is a lot of
Arabic resources here,
uh, you can click on any of them. This
will take you to
the link where you can find it in the, uh,
in the home
host for it, so it is, it is available for
everyone to use it.
The other, uh, a very important aspect
that I would like to also
highlight here is UCLA
UC, the manuscript collection,
um, for UCLA manuscript collection
here is where this guide is,
uh, there is a guide for the Middle East,
uh, the Middle East or Islamic Studies
manuscript collection at UCLA and this
guide has a lot of information really
wonderful information,
uh, was kind of most of everything the
finding aids and
and, uh, some information about selected
books, and selected projects, selected
even journals, and periodicals, and
specific projects and so on.
So but actually what I would like you to
start if you are interested in this area
and I would really
love to see, um, some research is going
this, this way because it's needed,
um, if you can go to the
decision where there was a workshop last
year
that actually was also organized by the
Center for Near Eastern Studies, uh,
last year around this time or before
last year
and it was, uh, organized by Dr. Luke
Yarborough and he and our colleague in
Michigan University
did a wonderful job actually see,
organizing this job and talking about
UCLA collection
and using them in, in teaching about, uh,
manuscript, uh,
manuscripts and for Middle East Studies
or family for Islamic Studies
so uh I would recommend definitely if
you are interested in manuscripts to
look at
or watch this, uh, episode for, uh,
the introduction, Dr. Ali Behdad and
Dr. Luke Yarborough,
who spoke about the collection, um, and
from that
uh, um, introduction or
preview, um, I learned that actually UCLA
collection is the second,
um, the second largest collection in the
in the U.S. after
Princeton. After that, Yale,
um, so it's about eight to ten thousand
items in this collection
so it's wonderful really to use this
collection and to
know it's already there for you to use,
um,
there are some, uh, highlights from
from that collection, which is [magnesium]
project this is an Arabic and Persian
collection so you can also find
information about this, uh, here in
in the, in the same guide for the Middle
East Studies for the
manuscripts of UCLA so this is actually
the [manesium] project they talk about
them in two sections here,
um, these are really good ones, uh, or
they are all very good actually but
these are kind of highlighted
collections,
uh, other than that I would like also to
speak about the,
uh, the the ephemeral project
idep which is this one here, uh,
among the, the great work that UCLA did,
uh, for the Middle East Studies, or for
international studies, they actually
collected a lot of ephemera
materials and they are in the, uh,
nice platform and this platform is, um,
is available to everyone. It's open
access, you can see
what is included here, uh, some, uh,
some Persian, some Arabic but actually
for the Middle East you can see them all
collected here,
um, this is, this includes all of these
things and, for example, Tahrir Documents
are here so you can see what are these
ephemeral
collections are. They are in, um,
they are about 360. is -60 or -70 titles,
uh, and these are all here around when
Tahrir was actually, uh,
the main point of attention aboard,
around that time.
So, um, this is all what I have
the other than that actually I would
really reiterate what, uh,
Iman and Heather said about, uh, being
available for,
um, for, uh,
for everyone and
anyone who is interested in asking
questions or reaching us, to reaching out
to us to
ask questions about research. We are all
happy to get these resources, to get this,
to get these
questions and answer them as we can. The
guides are available to everyone so you
can find the UCLA guide, you can find
my guide
and happy to answer questions. Thank you
all.
Thank you very much for those three
wonderful presentations.
All three of you, this is incredibly
helpful.