Forum on Remote Research Possibilities for Graduate Students - Session 4 (UC Library)

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

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Panel with Iman Dagher (Arabic and Islamic Studies Catalog Librarian, UCLA); Heather Hughes, (Subject librarian for Comparative Literature, Global Studies, and Middle East Studies, UC Santa Barbara); and Mohamed Hamed (Middle Eastern and Near Eastern Studies Librarian, UC Berkeley)


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Duration: 01:03:56

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Transcript:

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.


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