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Overview
Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library, 1475-1900 is a full-text searchable digital collection of early printed books in Arabic script. This collection covers Islamic and Christian literature, law, science, mathematics, astrology, alchemy, medicine, geography, travel, history, chronicles, and literature. It also includes European translations of Arabic works and Arabic translations of Christian religious works.
The collection will be available in three modules:
- Module 1: Islamic literature, Christian literature and Islamic law
- Module 2: Sciences, History, Geography and Periodicals
- Module 3: Literature, Grammar, Language, Catalogues and General Works
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Collection Content
Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library is a collection of titles cataloged in A. G. Ellis’s Early Arabic Printed Books in the British Museum, London, 1898-1901 (3 vols), with additional material from the India Office Library. Included are works printed in Alexandria, Baghdad, Beirut, Bulak, Cairo, Constantinople, London, Lucknow, Paris, St Petersburg, Tunis, Vienna among others. The majority of works are in Arabic text, though some content is bilingual or in other languages.
Gale represents that the collection will represent the entirety of unique titles and editions in the Ellis bibliography. Gale projects that the collection will encompass 7,000 titles (in 12,000 volumes), and will include approximately 2.5 million pages.
Early Arabic Printed Books: from the British Library will be published in three parts.
Module 1: Islamic literature, Christian literature and Islamic Law (December 2015)
The Quran, traditions (Hadith), tafsir, theology, prayers and sermons, traditions -interpretation, biographies of traditionalists; bibles, commentaries, Christian teaching and practice, liturgies, prayer books; law, fiqhand statutes, fatwas and rulings
Module 2: Sciences, History, Geography and Periodicals (March 2016)
Natural history, medicine, physiology, other science, classical sciences, philosophy, logic, politics, ethics, mathematics, arithmetic, geometry, mechanics, astrology, chemistry; history, early caliphs and conquests, modern history, genealogy, biographies; geography and travel, regional geography, topography, and periodicals
Module 3: Literature, Grammar, Language, Catalogues and General Works(December 2016)
Folktales, pre-Islamic literature (Antar, BaniHilal, Imru'lqays), Islamic poetry and prose (al-Burdah), poetry and prose (maqamat), Kalilahwa-dimnah, Luqman, proverbs and sayings, Thousand and one nights, later literature, poetry and prose, general literature; language and lexicography, dictionaries, grammar, syntax, rhetoric, 'ilmal-bayan, catalogues, manuscript catalogues, etc
Gale has expressed interest in working with other libraries to identify additional Arabic primary sources and are planning future releases.
Delivery
Some of the features included are: searchable Arabic text with right-to-left read, a user interface for right-to-left navigation and reading, searchable metadata in Arabic and European languages and international citation tools.
According to the publisher, investment in OCR technologies has improved the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of printed Arabic to approximately 75% accuracy. At the "Gale Symposium: Middle East" (2015), the company confirmed that Gale is not manually correcting OCR, but is adding rich metadata to records to assist in discovery.
MARC records (5000+ titles) are available for loading into local catalogs to increase discoverability. Author/Title information are rendered in original scripts (Arabic, Cyrillic, Syriac, Greek, Bengali, etc) as well as in Romanized format. Users have reported that some records were found to have missing romanized title information.
Users report several instances where images have been redacted from the online publications. Gale reports this is in response to cultural sensitivities (such as the prohibition of visual depictions of Muhammad). Purchasers may acquire the missing images from Gale to make available locally, though the images may not be integrated into the product.
Appendix
Title List
Early Arabic Printed Books
(631.86 KB)
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