Unedited_Forum-on-Remote-Research-Possibilities-for-CNES-Graduate-Students---Session-1-fix-ko-nkg.mp3
Good afternoon. My name is Ali Behdad and
I'm the director of the Center for Near
Eastern Studies at UCLA and on behalf of
my colleagues I would like to welcome
you to this forum on remote research. It
is difficult to recall a time when doing
research in the Middle East has been
more challenging, whether as a result of
the coronavirus epidemic, officially
sanctioned restrictions on research, or
political violence. In light of these
challenges, we at the Center for Near
Eastern Studies have organized this
two-part forum for scholars and students
who need, or wish, to undertake research
on Middle Eastern topics in various
fields of Humanities and Social Sciences
at least in the near future, if not
longer. I'm pleased to introduce our two
distinguished scholars in this panel, who
will share their knowledge of online
resources and offer advice for doing
research during these difficult times.
Our first speaker is Dr. Charles
Kurzman, who is professor of sociology
and co-director of the Center for Middle
East and Islamic Studies at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Professor Kurzman, who received his
Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, is the author of
numerous works including the book The
Missing Martyrs (2011), which was reprinted
in 2019, Democracy Denied 1905-1915, which
was published in 2008, and Unthinkable
Revolution in Iran, which was published
in 2004. As well, he is the editor of the
anthologies Liberal Islam (1998) and
Modernist Islam 1840-1940, which was
published in 2002.
Our second speaker is Dr. Dale Correa, who
is Middle Eastern Studies librarian and
history coordinator for the University
of Texas Libraries. She received her Ph.D.
from NYU and is an expert on archival
research (domestic and international) with
a focus on the MENA region as well as
strategies for making scholarship more
open and discoverable. She's past
president of the Middle East Librarians
Association, having served as president
of the organization during 2018-2019. Dr.
Correa has also served on the Executive
Board of the Middle East Materials
Project and the Center for Research
Libraries. Her research interests include
the development and theory and
methodology for the academic study of
Islam and religion social communitarian
epistemology manuscripts history and
multilingualism in the pre-modern
islamic aid intellectual tradition.
Dr. Kurzman and Dr. Correa will speak
for about 20 minutes each, followed by
20-minute question and answer session. Thank you
both of you for joining us. Professor
Kurzman, we'll start with you.
Thank you, Professor Behdad. It's a pleasure
to be meeting with you all under these
virtual circumstances and tough times, of
course, in the world and also for
research. I've prepared a few comments,
primarily for graduate students who work in
Middle East Studies. I can't help you
with your financial difficulties. I can't
help you with the health challenges. What
I can offer is a bit of historical
perspective and perhaps some thoughts on
ways forward, paths forward that we might
be thinking about in this unprecedented
era. The coronavirus
pandemic is unprecedented in its
particular form, but the idea of a crisis
in the Middle East is not unprecedented.
In fact there's been many crises in the
Middle East that have disrupted both the
everyday life in the region as well as
research the region. I mean if we look
back just over a century to World War I,
you had the mobilization of the
Ottoman army; the largest army the
Ottomans had ever fielded. They were
fighting battles pretty much across the
region, there was widespread displacement,
civilian suffering, of course, academics
were affected by this as well and then
in World War II and during various
other wars and other crises in the
region. There have been numerous times
over the last century when research was
not possible in the region. We're not the
first people ever to experience this and
even in recent years these challenges
have have multiplied. So one indicator of
this is the number of students from the
United States studying abroad in the
Middle East region. This data is from the
Institute for International Education
their annual open doors report and you
can see that the numbers of the past
decade since about 2009 have been
declining. They've declined by about a
third after ramping up hugely in the
previous decade. Now these are mainly
undergraduates, not graduate students,
and it's only one indicator, of course, of
research in the region but even this
decline over the last 10 years really
doesn't show the full story. The decline
is even steeper in many parts of the
Middle East. If we break out three
countries that are the largest sites for
study abroad in the region for American
students, in the blue you see Israel has
actually increased the
number of study abroad students and is
now about half of all students in the
region are studying abroad in Israel. In
green, you see Egypt and the numbers,
which were a couple thousand a dozen years
ago
dropped off substantially in 2010-2011,
of course, with the uprisings there
and then with the coup in 2013, the
numbers have been close to zero and I
find it very hard given the repression
of academics, especially foreign
academics, in Egypt I find it hard to
recommend that students go there. In red
we see Turkey, where it also had a
couple thousand students studying abroad
there, American students, and then during
the attempted coup and the backlash and
the repression of academics there then
those numbers have have declined since
2015. So there's been all sorts of things,
challenges to research in the region. Of
course, there's a a political repression
in a number of countries. I'm sure you're
familiar with the Middle East Studies
Association Committee for Academic
freedom CAFMENA, the Middle East and
North Africa region, and another one for
North America, and that committee is
issuing dozens and dozens of letters
about the repression and mistreatment of
academics in the region. So even before
the coronavirus, it was tough to do
research in many parts of the Middle East. And then,
of course, the coronavirus comes and we
see here in this chart I just thought
was an interesting graphic, the air
travel, the number of flights drops
dramatically over several weeks at the end
of January and into the middle of
February this is globally and has been
climbing up since then so it's now about
two-thirds of where it was in the beginning
of January, but most of those flights are
flying almost empty and even if you were
able to get a flight, once you get off
there's now travel restrictions almost
everywhere in the world so you wouldn't
be allowed, you're not allowed to go into, to
cross borders in the way that you might
have been several months ago. So we have
a huge problem. How do we continue to do
our research? How do we continue to keep
this enterprise going? I'd like to give
two examples of people who faced travel
restrictions in the past and how they
kept going. These examples are going to
come from the field of sociology. my home
discipline. but of course, there's many
other examples that could be taken from
other fields. The first one I want to
mention is W.I. Thomas. He's famous in
sociology, in the history of sociology,
the lead author of a classic book called
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America
that was published in 1918. So Thomas was
teaching at the University of Chicago
and was going travelling to Poland each
year, for part of the year, for
several years to collect material and do
field research on the peasantry in
Poland and then World War I breaks out
and he can't go back to Europe and, in
fact, many of his notes, about a third of
his notes and materials, that he gathered
were lost in the war and so he had to
reconfigure his project. The story he
apparently would tell about how he did
this was that one day he was
walking in Chicago, in the alleys of
Chicago, and somebody threw a bag of
trash out of a window and it landed,
almost hit him, it landed in front of
him and broke open and he sees there on
the ground a handwritten letter in
Polish that was a letter from somebody's
family in Poland or to
somebody you know it's in Polish it was
his topic of study and he gets the idea,
or so he said, that using letters as a
source of material for research could be
the replacement for the field research
that he had been doing. So he puts an ad
in the Chicago Polish language newspaper
and asked people to send letters to his
office and get thousands and thousands
of letters and he uses those as the basis
then for his for a large chunk of the
research that he gets published in this
masterpiece, this five-volume set The Polish
Peasant in Europe and America and takes
on a research assistant who had fled
Poland because of the war,
as a co-author, Florian Znaniecki, who goes
through and helps him with all of this
and helps to write up the results. So
here's a case where worldwide disaster,
and travel restrictions lead to a novel
source of data of evidence of
research materials. The second example I
want to give is more recent. This is my
colleague and friend and former student
Ali Kadivar, at Boston College who can't
go back to Iran, his home country, and so
instead of doing the field work that he
might otherwise have done, decides to
use online news sources as data and he goes
systematically through all sorts of news
reports that are collected on websites or
in various subscription services for
Iranian newspapers and we see here a quote
about his method from an article he
just published, using this sort of data,
just published with co-author in
the journal Comparative Politics. So work
can continue. It forces us when we can't
go to our original plans to come up with
Plan B's and to think of novel ways then
of doing our research.
So I have a few ideas of paths you might
follow for doing research in the current
era, when we can't travel and can't reach
the materials that we had
hoped to originally. The first point, I'm
going to make five points, but the first
one is to keep reading if you can.
This is a moment where we're stuck but
if we can manage the motivational
side there is a lot of material out
there.
Dr. Correa is going to present some of
that material in ways you can access it
I'm sure Rustin Zarkar, who's our
Middle East librarian here at the
University of North Carolina, has also
given a talk where he lays out a bunch
of resources that are available, the
address is on there. I'll put these
slides that I'm showing on my website
and they have links so you can follow anything
you want. And another source that I want
to mention, although Dr. Correa may be mentioning
this already, is archive.org, which has
a new policy during the pandemic of
allowing easier checkout policies where
you can check out a book that they've
digitized, even if it's under
copyright, many of them can be checked
out during this time, so continue, keep
reading, if you can. The next thing I want
to suggest is thinking about new forms
of evidence, new forms, new types of
research, in fact, sometimes it might
involve learning new tricks. I'm trying
to learn these tricks myself. There's a
group called the Islamicate Digital
Humanities Network, idhn.org, that
is people who know these big data skills,
they are proficient in R and other
programming languages, and they are
trying to think about how you can use
the massive amount of digital text
that's out there for new sorts of
research projects. We had a panel, a thematic
conversation at the Middle East
Studies Association last year, we're
planning to do another this year in the
unlikely chance that we actually get to
meet, but there's an ongoing conversation
and these skills especially learning R,
which is extremely helpful for wrangling
large amounts of text, for scraping it
from the web, and various sources and then analyzing
and presenting it graphically. I'm
trying to learn these new skills,. I think
many of us would do well to add these to
our toolkits for research. Another avenue
is to use new forms of data. So the ACSS,
the Arab Council for the Social Sciences,
has a data archive that just went live
last year it's called the ACSS
Dataverse, dataverse like universe, but
for data. There's a network of these data-
verses, it's open source interface
software, and so the ACSS dataverse is at
dataverse.acss.org, and there is a
network of all of these data archives
around the world. This one focuses on
data sets from the Arab region. There's
there's more data out there than you
might imagine so if you're willing, or
interested, in doing quantitative data
analysis there's quite a bit of material
growing amout of material and if you
know of people who have research who
have data sets that they'd be willing to
contribute they're taking deposits as
well at the dataverse and I'm honored
to be working with them on getting this
thing up and going. There's also
qualitative research in the dataverse.
It can take data into all forms but most
of it is primarily quantitative data.
Another path forward is online
interviews. So for those of you who are
used to doing fieldwork and ethnography
and interviews in person and that was all
your training and that's what you expected
to do, it is a weak substitute but it
is still possible and you can keep your
momentum going for a research project by
arranging online interviews. It will keep
your head in the project. It'll keep
you keep you moving forward, to get in
touch with the various organizations or
through social media, meeting people and
arranging online interviews. The one
thing I want to mention here is that if
you have gone through your institutional
review board, your Human Subjects
protection folks, and that and all of
your material was that in-person stuff
and getting consent in person, you may
need to get in touch,
in advance, with your IRB or
institutional officials, in order to make
sure that your stuff can be adapted to
get consent online. A final approach I
want to mention is international
collaboration. So international
collaboration has been a watchword in the
Sciences and the Social Sciences for
many years, less so, frankly, in the Social
Sciences than in the Natural Sciences
and less so in the Humanities, I think,
than in the Social Sciences, but perhaps
this is the moment, this is the crisis
that's going to generate, force us to
create more international collaborations,
where you have some books and access to
some materials but someone somewhere
else doesn't and they have access to stuff
that you don't have access to and
perhaps through sharing we can get
through a sharing economy and move our
research forward through new forms of
collaboration. It would be lovely if that
were a side effect of this pandemic, that we
reach out to people and we rely on them
more I think that would be a lovely
outcome. So in summary, you know,
graduate students today in the midst of
this pandemic face, you may face health
problems, financial problems, travel
problems, political problems, all sorts
of problems. And one of the problems you
may be facing is sort of a motivational
problem, and I know I'm facing that too.
It's hard to focus, it's hard to keep the
work going. Make time in the day to
actually get back to the kinds of
thoughts, the kinds of research, the kinds
of creativity, that we expect of
ourselves and try to overcome this
feeling that your life is sort of on
hold and what I'd like to suggest is
both the sense of historical perspective,
that this, you know, previous generations of
researchers have faced their own
challenges their own problems of travel
restrictions and difficulties
of political and all sorts of
other problems. This is a set of
challenges we face and maybe that
historical perspective helps and also
these new avenues of thinking creatively
about new forms of data, new ways of
accessing materials will help us get
over this hump as well and get us back
to doing the kind of creative,
substantive research that we're capable
of despite the challenges today. Thank
you very much. Thank you very much for
that incredibly inspiring and
informative presentation
Professor Kurzman, I'm sure there will be
some questions from the students
afterward. I would like to now ask Dr.
Correa to present her talk. Thank you all
very much and thank you Ali for that
wonderful introduction and thank you
Charlie for fantastic beginning to this
conversation that was all extremely useful
and I was taking notes myself too so it was great
for me as well. So everyone's going to
have a different approach to dealing
with research during, as we've said, these
very unprecedented times of an
international pandemic. My approach is
informed by my work as a librarian as
well as key experiences that I've had in
my scholarly life. Notably, living in
Uzbekistan for about six months during
my dissertation research and not having
access to reliable internet or my Tier
1 research library and having to do
fieldwork without all those resources,
which is actually fairly normal for
fieldwork in the Middle East and Central
Asia, in my case. But that was when my
researching creativity was really tested
and so reflecting on those experiences
and lessons learned there and also what
I've seen has worked for graduate
students and faculty, recently, and
applying that to this situation where
we know we can't travel and we know we
can't access certain libraries and archives in the MENA
region. I'm gonna take us through a
number of resources and I'm glad this is
recorded because there's a whole bunch
I'm going to go through but they are all
referenced in various places
on very important websites that I'll
talk about, where we have lists of
online archives that libraries consult, or
on research guides where they've been
linked and I will show you where those
are so you have those reference points
to start with again. So as Professor
Kurzman said, this is a pandemic, you
need to go easy on yourself. Okay, all is
not lost.
There is a lot that you still can do and
there will be a lot more that you can do
in the future once we wait for those safer
conditions to come to passc. So, I want to
start us with questions, what can you
focus on now? What's possible now? Perhaps
research at North American libraries,
checking catalogs of libraries and
archives in the Middle East, to plan for fieldwork
in the future. Locating digitized fully
accessible online collections that do
actually inform the research that you need to
be doing. That may or may not be useful
for you depending on the kind of
research you're doing if you need
basically the information from a given
manuscript or document, but not the
document or manuscript itself, if the physicality
of the item is not as important to you then these
digital collections are going to be great because you
get access to all of that. If you need to interact
with the actual object at least this is
a starting point, okay, and then you can
go from there. So I'm going to break down
these questions into near-, medium-, and
long-term goals, although there's much
overlap amongst them all. So the near-
term goals might be research in North
American libraries. This does not
necessarily mean only secondary sources
and print works but it does lean
heavily that way. I'm going to talk about
Hathi Trust emergency temporary access
service, the National Emergency Library
at archive.org,
Arabic collections online and the
Library of Arabic Literature. Next
looking at the medium-term goals, we
might think about locating digitized
primary source collections for your
research; okay things that we can find
online that will work for you. This is
where we will gather sources from lists of
resources like research guides, Access to
Mideast Islamic Resources (that's a blog
sorry) and Hazine, which is another
blog. All these guys will come very much
in handy and those are your starting
reference points for any of these kind
of questions.
We'll look at some of the highlights
from these, including the Qatar Digital
Library, Noorlib, Digital archive for the
Study of Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscriptions,
and Archnet. And then in terms of long-
term goals,
so we're thinking about planning, maybe
even grant writing for the future
because what really helps the grants is
being able spell out exactly where you
need to go, who you're going to talk to,
and what you're going to look at and so
that's checking the catalogs of
libraries, archives in the Middle East to
plan for your fieldwork. And there's also
the possibility of ordering copies
without traveling, either officially
through web sites, or unofficially
through contacts that you may have or
you can possibly through your library
through the interlibrary loan service,
okay so we'll talk about that. We'll look
at Yazmalar, which is a Turkish
national search engine search engine; Ideo-alkindi
search engine in Egypt for the Dominican Institute; the
Iranian National Library, if it's
cooperating; the Center for Islamic
Study in Istanbul; and Union Catalogue of
Manuscripts located in the UK called
Fihrist. So getting started to give you
these reference pointbs, let me share my
screen with you so that we can start
getting into these. Alright that's a
preview of what's to come.
Okay so this should be familiar to you
the UCLA Middle Eastern Studies Research
guide it's not
familiar to me unfortunately, I didn't write
this one, it's not mine, but I have made
reference to it in the past and this is
always a place where you can start with
your research, okay?
There will be digital collections linked
here. You will be able to look at recommended
reference sources that are both
subscription through the library, like
Index Islamicus and things that are more open access.
You'll even be able to find, I recommend this as well, the Arabic Almanac
and the various dictionaries. So literally you have
all these things already in your pocket
you would probably take these with you when you went to do your fieldwork.
So I strongly recommend taking a look at your
research guide and getting a sense of
where you can start from there. Usefully, the
UCLA Library also has put
together a guide on temporary expanded
access. This is very important; what libraries have been
able to do is get free trials to resources they would
not normally be able to afford and they
are usually good through this summer.
That's been my experience with
subscriptions or the trials that we've
been able to get at UT. This is not
guarantee that the library will be able
to acquire any of these resources in the
future. They are quite expensive we're talking about
e-resources especially anything that
requires a subscription rather than just
a one-time payment but with this
temporary access you can benefit from
these resources now, okay? And if you need to return
to it later you can always request that
from the library maybe you can get a
second trial because again these are
unprecedented circumstances that maybe
people need to take a second look so
publishers are going to be very
interested in letting you work with these
materials. So I would take a look at the
things that are offered here as
temporary resources, the things that you
can still exploit for your research. Also
linked here are Hathi Trust and the
National Emergency and yeah National
Emergency Library, which I will speak
about shortly.
But I just want you to know that you can
also use... you can also use my guide at
UT-Austin, it's publicly available, it's
perfectly fine to use mine as well. Be
aware that any links, for example, in
databases and indexes,
these are all going to be UT links so
you'd want to take that back to UCLA
library website and find your way to the
databases through there. But I do have a
tab on open access and freely available
resources and reference sources over
here on the right. I try not to privilege
one language over another so I try to
have representation from the main
languages in the leaf. And we'll be talking
particularly about this guide right here
Hazine's guide to online archives and digitized collections
and resources today. So you can find that on
my guide if you need a reference point in the future.
On my guide, as well, I like to link to
other major collections so, for example, Columbia,
Duke, Michigan's collections and Michigan in
particular this libguide is very
useful for manuscript research. If you're
doing any kind of manuscript research in
any of the languages of the Middle East, this is
a wonderful guide to go to and I did not
recreate this or attempt to do this at
UT, my research guide, because there's no
reason to reinvent the wheel. My
colleague, Evyn Kropf, has done an amazing
job at
Michigan putting this together so I
strongly recommend checking that out
if that is an area of research for you.
Alright so Hazine.
Hazine is a blog that is edited currently by
a graduate student at Princeton
University and fellow librarian
colleague of mine and so they collect
experiences at libraries and archives
throughout the Middle East and they like
to make lists. They have a lot of great
lists.
And the two that I want to highlight
today are the Online Archives, Digitized
Collections and Resources
for Middle East, North African, and Islamic(ate)
Studies and [A] Guide to Online Visual
Sources in Middle East, North Africa, and Islamic
Studies. And so these will be very useful
for you during this time but also in
general to get your research done.
As Professor Kurzman said, it's not just
right now that we have these troubles.
without Throughout research in the
Middle East we have temporary to
permanent closures of libraries and archives,
we have travel restrictions, we have bad
politics that don't let us get visas to
go to different places, so there are
always obstacles that we're going to
encounter and so these digital resources
are always going to be key to that. So
this is good training, basically, for
having a backup and a very full research
profile for your work. So Hazine
mentions a couple of the broad sources
that I'm going to be talking about but
I'll let you all peruse this it's a huge
list it's fantastic it's broken down by
subject and area of study and format so
it's definitely worth a read. The Visual
Resources Guide is similar; this was put
together by another librarian colleague
of mine and we'll be looking at a couple
here. Some of these are open access, some
of them are not, it's kind of a mixture,
but UCLA should be
subscribed to those that are not open
access is a very common one. All
right, those are the areas for getting
started these are your reference points
okay? Now let's go and look at some more
specific what are all of these things
that have talked about I've mentioned in
passing here so far? Hathi Trust.
You've probably encountered Hathi
Trust in Google searches. Maybe not
so much through your library, but if you
put titles or authors into a Google
search, you've likely been redirected to
Hathi Trust at some point. I can tell you
that in general it is better to sign in
to Hathi Trust with your university
account because that will actually get you
access to more material. You can login
with this bright yellow login button up
here you just select UCLA from the dropdown menu and you'll be prompted to put in your usual
username/password information. What Hathi
Trust is doing right now is running an
emergency temporary access service, feel
free to read this if you'd like. It's a
lot of library speak but what's
important is that they have a how-to and
what it means to use this service ok? So
what they've done is they have all these
digitized works from many different
collections throughout North America
and they've been able to say, for example,
UT Austin you have one copy of Tafsir
al-Qurtubi so if you want to access that
through HathiTrust only one person can
check it out at a time because that
would be the equivalent of the print
experience in your library. Let's say you
have two copies of Tafsir al-Qurtubi,
okay then two people can check it
out at the same time. So essentially
you're checking out ebooks, scans of
print materials that are in your library
and they are still in copyright okay and
this is what's really important Hathi
Trust before this you can only
access out of copyright materials in
full text, now you can access in
copyright materials as well through this
check out emergency access service okay?
So what that means though is that if you're
trying to get to a text that you think
might be popular with your fellow
students just like you would at the
library
it might not be available when you need
it because somebody might have it checked
out okay? So there are pluses and minuses
to this but it's really great because,
for example, in the case of UT, I cannot
speak for UCLA but for UT, 40%
our collection has been digitized to
HathiTrust, so that means 40% of our print
materials we can still access even though the
library is closed up and we don't have
interlibrary loan service so that's
really cool and so especially if you're
working on these near-term goals of doing research at
North American libraries or just UCLA's
library you want to make your coms list you want to get all your secondary research done
HathiTrust expands your ability to do
that by giving you access to print
materials that are in your library
anyway. All right okay so the National
Emergency Library is a bit more general.
This is through archive.org and by the
way at any point if you cannot see what
I'm talking about because screen sharing on Zoom
is usually pretty good but if at any point you can't
just shout. The National Emergency Library expands our access to in
copyright materials as well okay.
Archive.org is a huge unending infinite
resource that many institutions use the
platform for their collections so you'll
find for example one of the Ottoman
collections from Duke University is on
here and that one's out of copyright it's fully
available it's all good
but now what they've done is they've
made more of the material in their
collections available that are still in
copyright okay and so what I did what
you can do with this I just went to the
Browse with this one but you can limit
by language because I just want to see
how much representation from Middle
Eastern languages might there be and for
the three main languages, Persian, Turkish,
Arabic there's almost 100 items like 85
items or so and so that was better than
I thought honestly for this emergency
collection. Persian actually had the most
more than Arabic or Turkish, which is interesting. So this gives you a sense of
what you might find
in the Emergency Collection but as I
said archive.org is a much larger
resource in general and it contains all
kinds of resources you can find all of
your Arabic dictionaries for example in
archive.org if you want to see the
print, experience it in sort of a
print like environment. So next are
some things that you should probably
already know about if you're working in
Arabic but maybe you're just starting
out or haven't had a chance to look at them yet.
One of them is Arabic Collections Online
this is a project of NYU Abu Dhabi and some other
organizations and it has full text of
Arabic works at a number of institutions
that are out of copyright and so this
can be very useful if you're working on
things that are older print materials
especially anything from the [title missing] for example
you're gonna find a good amount of
material here.
The only issue from my perspective as a
librarian the only issue from my
perspective is that this is not
full-text searchable it has not been
OCR'd, so you have to read it like a book unfortunately.
That should be the benefit of online resources from and about the Middle East
is that we get some OCR out of it and we can then do full-text searching
you can mostly do that in HathiTrust for example
and some things on archive.org depending on how the PDF was uploaded and what they
did to it but unfortunately that's going
to be a drawback here but there's some
really classic standard pieces here like Kitab
al-bukhala, for example, right so this is a great
resource if you're doing Arabic. It's
obviously bilingual interface as
well which is just really cool a great
feature.
The second one is a Library of Arabic
Literature this is another NYU project
and this one's a little bit funky
because you have so it's also Arabic
English interface and the books are also
Arabic English usually facing
translation so the Arabic is all freely
available online in PDF okay if you want
just the Arabic editions they're all
here all the ones that have been
published for them.
Now if you want the translations you
have to go to JSTOR and to be honest I
didn't check for UCLA I'm going to
assume you have this but you might not
because it's a separate product that you
have to buy within JSTOR but these are
also available in JSTOR are the
translations okay so you kind of if you
want to have both the Arabic and English
together you're gonna have to have these
two tabs open with the Arabic PDFs
on one side and the JSTOR PDFs of the
English on the other but that is all
accessible online, which is great because again these
are some real classics on a variety of
topics between law, history and
literature. Alright so those are the near
term goals you know if you need kind of the
standard literature that you would have got at UCLA
Library anyway or for those who are not associated with UCLA,
at your institution things you would have
expected to find on the shelf those are
some ways that you can still get to some
of that material. It may be in the future
that libraries in
North America will start for example a
pickup service you can order books and then you pick them up
that's a possibility I'm not saying it's
happening anywhere but it's a possibility.
Or scanning for interlibrary loan
requests or scanning from the collection
itself may resume but all of that is
negotiation of safety for library
employmees of course who would have to
do that work
and we obviously don't want to put
anyone in unnecessary danger by starting
out those services too early, too soon so
those are things to keep in mind that
might be possible in the future. All
right so the medium-term goals we're
just gonna look at some of these they're
probably familiar to you but let's take
a look anyway the Qatar Digital Library this has
been a partnership between Qatar and the
British Libraryand they've digitized a
number of the collection in Qatar and
made the available online. These are mostly
handwritten but there's still some print
in here as well. So this is much like Arabic Collections
Online but a lot of it is handwritten
some early print it's going to skew
towards Gulf Studies but you might be
surprised as well what you'd find in
here so I would not rule it out. I just
did a search for Nasafi who is one of
my favorite scholars and it's got some
interesting things that aren't quite
related to him not the Nasafi that
I was looking for Umar Nasafi but Ahmad al-Nasafi,
which is great to but not the one I was looking for so
just bear that in mind that these might
offer some aspect of your research but
not entirely okay? Then Noorlib is an
Iranian resource and you can search
by title throughout full-text etc. and
but it's best if you make an
account to be able to actually view the
items. I've had varying
success with items being either open or
paid to view them so it's kind of here
and there. Some institutions have been
able to work out subscriptions to this,
which is great but it is a wonderful
resource for Iran based or Persian
language materials so, for example, Tafsir
an-Nasafi sorry you're gonna see Nasafi
a lot in this today he's my go-to guy right now. This one is
at least partially available usually it gives you the first page and then
you have to sign in and you can see there
multiple volumes here that they've
scanned so it's kind of similar to
Arabic Collections Online but also
adding the Persian element, which is useful. Then for
those who are doing Ancient Near East, I
don't know if any of you on the call
right now are doing Ancient Near East but
the Digital Archive for the Study of
Pre-Islamic Arabian Inscriptions is an
incredible online resource if you're
doing anything pre-Islamic epigraphy
etc. and so these are mostly browsable
you just click through to you know which
area, language you want to be looking at
and because these are corpora they've
built it into a corpora analysis tool
essentially so you can start doing
searches and building your data but you
can also look at the objects as well if
you need the images. This is a very
useful resource for that as well.
And then last but not least with these
medium-term goals looking for digital
materials is Archnet and this is
obviously about architecture in the Middle East
and I just did a search for the Suleymaniye in Istanbul
and it's pulled up a number of images of
the mosque of the Suleymaniye and other
related mosques and then also documents
related to the mosque itself. This is I
Damascas... so magazine articles related to it so it's not just
images but also architectural and
drawings and information as well as
related text strongly recomment that and that's all open
So thinking of long term goals, which kind
of in some cases it combines with the
medium-term goals we want to be able to
plan for our fieldwork in the future if
we can't do it this summer maybe we can do it next
summer or perhaps during the year if
things get better but otherwise we want to be
prepared and there are a number of
resources that'll help you with that.
Yazmalar is the Turkish national manuscripts and other
national heritage collection search
engine and you can see it's all first of
all you can put it in English and this
is something a caveat I have to give for
most of the Turkish websites you can
maybe put it in English but not
everything will convert over to English so
you're still going to have to either
know Turkish or use Google translate to get
through this but you can't get through it.
The second thing you need to know about
most all of them right now
Turkish search engines you need to do
the spelling the transliteration in the
Turkish form
and there may be of a difference of
opinion in Turkish how to transliterate
various names especially if there are
any vowels involved that can be change
there changing at all on that so you
want to search multiple times with your
keywords in different permutations of
what they could be okay thankfully Nesefi
is pretty straightforward
general agreement on what the vowels are
and sure enough it brings up the Nesefi I was interested in
and you can click through to see the record
for the material including any notes
about its size and type and you'll see
again this is this was not translated
into English so you all need to take
this to Google Translate if you don't
know Turkish but it is where you can get
some references and
references here to those to manuscript
catalogs theoretically you should be
able to see the images here I always
have this like mixed results with that
if it says display you should be able to
see it sometimes when you have an
account with them it works a little bit
better and you can order things and I
know people who have successfully
ordered materials to be sent to them in
the US either by email or on a CD so
that's worth checking out and trying
it's also something that once those
libraries open up again in Turkey you
might be able to ask friends who are in
Turkey to help you out if you can
identify the Shelf number right right
here like these for the manuscript then
you can have to go and request for you
and send it to you and compensate them
accordingly but another useful search
engine is Library the Dominican Institute for Oriental
Studies in Egypt and this is a
relatively new catalog
I'm going to do something more modern so
you can see more of what this
resource offers and this again is for
planning purposes to let you know what's
in the Dominican Library in Cairo and
what could you possibly do there if you
were able to go there in person. So here
we're talking about nationality
nationalism. etc. Lots of French works
obviously you can choose a language we
can limit to Arabic if we wanted and
with all these websites you have to
give them a second they're travelling
a long distance to get to you to get you
your information but that will limit us to anything that has
Arabic content in it so it's very
similar to what you'll find
and your UCLA and other North American
libraries as well.
These are mostly just records I think
it's very just very limited online
availability in my experience with this
one it's mostly just records this is a
planning catalog okay to be able to see
what could you access if you were able
to go there all right I promise I've only got a few
more left but these are all important for
you to see the Iranian National Library.
I think this is one that many people
don't think to go to especially if they
do Arabic. The Iranian National Library obviously
has a lot of Persian materials but also
has a lot of the Arabic classics and
fantastic editions of them as well and
they're often fully available online so
this one could actually fall under
medium-term goals too in case you can't
get a visa to Iran in the future. I've
done my search for Nasafi again here
and you'll see I was able to get some
good results with that just to give you
an example let's take a lot
that's gonna ask me to sign in okay so
this is another one like Noolib where
you're going to want an account but this
one is excellent because they
just have so much I'll show you the
Turkish Islamic Studies Center in
Istanbul - it's similar it's so
impressive how much Islamicate
material they have so the very least you
can get the catalog record if you sign
in and make an account I won't show you
right now you can also access the full
text materials some of them are open access
some of them are not so it's kind
of a mixed bag. Alright this is the Turkish Islamic
Studies Center in Istanbul it's also now
a university called 29th of May
University and it used to be much
simpler but they've really expanded
their offerings this is incredible here.
They have you can search across all the
manuscript libraries much like Yazmalar
but I think more accurate in some
ways than Yazmalar I prefer using
this search engine and you can also
search in their collections of Ottoman articles,
documents, all sorts of other articles on
Turkish history, literature, culture, and
arts, and then private papers and private
archives of various important figures as
well and then this one I think is
important for secondary research if you
do read Turkish the Divinity School
journals, articles, so let's do this one
so what it'll do it will take you to a
page where you can you can choose any of
those differents search areas so
Türkiye Kütüphaneleri VT will let
you search across all the manuscript
libraries Nesefi
and so this is again much like Yazmalar
it's telling you which library
collection is located in these are all
manuscripts and you'll be able to at
least take down that information if not
also find a way to request that
manuscript if you need it. It's an
incredible nationalised resource of
material that all this has been
centralized because these manuscripts
may not all be located in Istanbul they
look at all over the country that you
could search across all of the national
libraries locations. All right last one
is Fihrist so this is Union Catalogue of Manuscripts from the Islamicate World all located
in the UK. I did my Nasafi search again here it
automatically went to the people
category and so here I'm able to see
what titles they have under his name,
subjects associated with him and then
specific manuscripts that are attributed
to him and where they are located. These
do not link to full-text or to images
this is a union catalog so it's just
going to be the record information but
you can use this to plan if you ever do
need to go to the UK to do manuscript
research research or if you're able to
request them from these UK libraries
request copies, which should be possible
possibly even through interlibrary loan
services you at least have all of the
bibliographic information that you
need to do that it's extremely important
because a lot of the important
manuscripts and editions are located in
the UK so on that note there just a few
more general tips one you're going to
have a lot of bibliographic information
especially if you're doing a lot of
planning for fieldwork. I recommend using
a citation manager like Zotero to
organize all that information. Zotero
would be able to take this website and
just scrape all the
information and produce a record for you
in your Zotero library so you
don't even have to like enter it in
manually or anything like that.
I'm happy to consult with you if you
want to get started with Zotero but it's
also very easy to learn from the website
zotero.org. Secondly if all of this is
failing for you and you really just want
a PDF of text that you know should be
available and may be fairly common go to Google
put the text title in in the original
language with PDFs in English after it
and hit search and you will likely find
what you're looking for. It may not be
the exact edition that you want but
somebody's probably put it up somewhere.
When you see those search results
pay attention to the message boards
where people discuss the editions
discuss the different links to PDFs of
these works online and what's available and who is posting what. And then
lastly don't hesitate to check out
Facebook and academia.edu. These informal
networks of sharing information can be
crucial for finding these very rare
tidbits of information, for example, I
have a faculty member who's working on
Jews in Egypt and there is a Jews in
Egypt Facebook page and it's in Arabic
and it's primarily Egyptian Muslim
scholars who are working on the Jewish
community in Egypt but they have access
to incredible private archives and they
post these things and they will answer
your questions and they will get things
for you and share materials with you so
it's worth trying to find these groups
and entering that kind of collaborative
collegial atmosphere internationally
online to find your resources. Alright so
I know we've been through a lot and I'm
way over time and I apologize for that but I
really wanted to give you guys some good
highlights. All this is available through my research guide,
UCLA research guide, Hazine blog
you can find all of these different links again
and I am available to you, my other
Middle East librarian colleagues are
available to you, we don't just work for
the people at our universities we help
anybody who comes to us.
so thank you very much. Thank you very
much this have been incredibly wonderful
presentations very, not only informative,
but inspiring and so we're very grateful
to both of you for for accepting our
invitation and and providing us with
these inspiring talks. Thank you very
much.