Category Archives: Online resources

Kraus-Meyerhof Offprints now online!

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The Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the American University in Cairo is pleased to announce the launch of the Kraus-Meyerhof Offprints digital collection.

The Kraus-Meyerhof Offprints digital collection includes indexes to journal articles, books chapters, and portions of larger works. Generally printed at the same time as the book or journal, offprints are printed for the author’s use. The indexes from the Kraus-Meyerhof Offprints offer a comprehensive look at the articles and book chapters in the collection. Topics covered include Arabic literature, Islamic philosophy, Arab medicine, and Muslim scholarship.

The offprints were originally collected by Paul Kraus, an Arabist born in Prauge in 1904. Kraus was educated in Europe and spent several years in Cairo and the Middle East before his death in 1944. The collected offprints feature scholarship authored by German opthamologist, author, medical historian Max Meyerhof. Dr. Max, as he was referred to by patients, was born in 1874 and died in 1945 in Cairo where he helped establish medical care in Egypt.

The collection is available in the Rare Books and Special Collections Digital Library.

New FREE resource: Shamaa

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Hi friends! Hot off the proverbial presses, a new FREE online bibliographical resource.

Shamaa is a free bibliographic database, web-based, trilingual (Arabic, English and French) in Education . It covers Master theses, PhD dissertations, articles, books and reports from a large number of universities, institutions and organizations from Arab countries since 2007.

Shamaa’s Mission: Shamaa provides specialists and stakeholders free access to the educational publications produced in the Arab countries, by making them available on the Internet. The database includes bibliographic information, abstracts and, when available, the full text of educational studies published in Arabic, English or French.

Shamaa

Shamaa’s Vision: Shamaa aspires to be the main reference for researchers and others concerned with educational knowledge in its capacity as a documentation database for all sorts of intellectual educational production in the Arab countries.

 

You will be able to access Shamaa website and its database at the following link:  http://www.shamaa.org/en/component/Main/index.asp

Classical Persian Literature

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Hi friends! A new online resource for classical Persian literature is now available for your perusal. The Text Archive of Persian Classical Literature is a project based in Osaka, Japan. Some of the notable texts available are the fable Kalilah wa Dimnah, Masnavi-ye ma’navi and the Samak-e ‘aiyar, a famous prose narrative whose only known manuscript exists in the Bodlein Library of Oxford University.

Enjoy!

Alexandria Bombardment of 1882 Photograph Album

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The Alexandria Bombardment of 1882 Photograph Album digital collection was originally compiled by Italian photographer Luigi Fiorillo. This unique resource documents the British naval attack on ‘Urabi Pasha’s nationalists, who revolted against Taufik Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, from 1879 to 1882. Fiorillo’s fifty page album records damage to Alexandria’s neighborhoods, particularly the harbor and the fortress district. The images trace the development of episode from the arrival of the British fleet to the destruction of the emerging downtown district. Further, the photographs show the artillery and forts used by the resistance. The album also features portraits of the key players in the bombardment, including ‘Urabi Pasha, Khedive Taufik, Admiral Seymour, and Sir Wolseley.

World Best Seller series (سلسلة روائع القصص العالمية)

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Hi friends! Looking to work on your Arabic reading and comprehension? Check out the newly acquired bilingual World Best Seller series (سلسلة روائع القصص العالمية) for some English classics translated into Arabic!

The texts themselves are split between English and Arabic, the Arabic does not include tanwiin (so be sure to consult your grammar books) but the translations are very good and great practice for building confidence.

 

Early European Books

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Early European Books is a Proquest project in partnership with major European Libraries, such as the Royal Library of Copenhagen, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, and the Wellcome Library. Early European Books is issued as a series of annual collections, each offering access to the early printed books of one or more major libraries. These collections aim to form a seamless and increasingly comprehensive survey of printing in Europe to 1700.

All works printed in Europe before 1701, regardless of language, fall within the scope of the Early European Books project, together with all pre-1701 works in European languages printed further afield. Early European Books is largely concerned with non-Anglophone materials, and predominantly non-Anglophone collections have been made available for digital capture. The database includes a few titles of Avicenna, Ibn Zuhr and Abu al-Qasim al-Zaharawi, in Arabic, Latin translation or bilingual editions.

Early European Books offers full-colour, high-resolution (400 ppi) facsimile images scanned directly from the original printed sources. Each item in the collection is captured in its entirety, complete with its binding, edges, endpapers, blank pages, and any loose inserts, providing scholars with a wealth of information about the physical characteristics and provenance histories of the original artefacts.

Detailed descriptive bibliographic metadata accompanies each set of facsimile Document Images to support browsing and searching. Users of Early European Books are also provided with functionality that allows them to pinpoint particular images containing manuscript annotation and various kinds of non-textual printed matter including illustrations and maps.

Early European Books is accessible to McGill users, through our database portal.

South and Southeast Asian Literature database trial

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McGill Library is currently trialling South and Southeast Asian Literature from Alexander Street Press, which is a constantly growing collection of fictions, short fictions, poems, interviews, and manuscript materials written in English by writers in South and Southeast Asia and their Diasporas.

The collection comprises literature written originally in English by writers who either were born in or identify themselves culturally with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, and Fiji. Because the South and Southeast Asian Diasporas are so widely cast, the collection also includes the work of writers living or working in Africa, the United Kingdom, North America, and the Caribbean. The collection will focus upon literature written during the late-colonial and postcolonial eras, but it will also include earlier work that is essential to scholarship in this area.

Check it out here, and let us know what you think!

Early Qur’ans from the Jean-Joseph Marcel collection

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Jean-Joseph Marcel (1776-1854), having been appointed the head of the printing shop dispached to Egypt together with Napoleon’s military troops, stayed in Alexandria and Cairo from 1798 to 1801. Beside executing his direct duty of publishing newspapers for the French Army and leaflets for the Egyptians, he was also mastering his knowledge of Arabic and collecting antiquities. After his return to Paris, Marcel became the head of the Republican printing house. Twelve years later, after Napoleon’s downfall, he was discharged from public service and started to publish his own works and research.

His collection of Islamic materials contains about 2000 parchment leaves forming 130 items, all written on parchment except one, which is written on paper. Thanks to the National Library of Russia, the Marcel collection is now accessible online. Enjoy!