Resources

In order to take advantage of the opportunities provided by a vast and well-connected digital environment, the Encyclopaedia Iranica project has adopted a more expansive vision, aimed at providing not only original content but also access to other relevant digital resources and projects. 

Afghanistan Digital Library - "The immediate objective of the Afghanistan Digital Library is to retrieve and restore the first sixty years of Afghanistan’s published cultural heritage. The project is collecting, cataloging, digitizing, and making available over the Internet as many Afghan publications from the period 1871–1930 as it is possible to identify and locate. In addition to books, this will eventually include all published serials, documents, pamphlets, and manuals."

Women's Worlds in Qajar Iran - "Women's World in Qajar Iran is a digital archive supported by Harvard University. It consists of textual, oral, and visual materials related to the lives of women during the Qajar era (1796-1925). The goal of WWIQ is to identify, select, digitize, and make public relevant materials found mostly in private collections."

Avestan Digital Archive - "The Avestan Digital Archive (ADA) seeks to be a digital archive containing all Avestan manuscripts spread all over the world. The Avesta, the holy book of the Zoroastrian religion, was last edited at the end of the 90s of the 19th century by the German scholar K. F. Geldner."

Shahnama Project - "This site brings you a comprehensive collection of manuscripts of the Shahnama and a display of the miniature paintings in each one. There are currently 502 manuscripts and single pages recorded, 10,380 records of paintings, and 6,275 images from all over the world, now accessible with a few clicks of a mouse."

OCIMCO (Oxford & Cambridge Islamic Manuscripts Catalogue Online) - "The Bodleian and Cambridge University Libraries hold manuscripts of some 10,000 Islamic texts, including many early and rare items. There is currently no electronic access to the Bodleian’s published Islamic manuscript catalogues and several hundred manuscripts can only be accessed through card catalogues. Similarly, while Cambridge University Library has scans of its printed catalogues online, these are not searchable, and a further 399 manuscript descriptions can only be accessed through card catalogues. This pilot project will make available to users in a searchable interface c. 10,000 basic manuscript descriptions taken from printed and card catalogues of the two libraries." 

Bibliographia Iranica - "Despite the existence of a tremendous amount of beneficial research in the field of Iranian studies, no exhaustive bibliography in this research domain is publicly available. Prof. Houchang Chehabi has kindly provided the Iranian Studies Group at MIT with his invaluable Bibliographia Iranica which exceeds 6,000 references."

Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan - "This site is part of an ongoing project to fully catalogue the Islamic Manuscripts Collection at the University Of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A limited amount of descriptive information has already been gathered for each manuscript and entered in our library catalogue Mirlyn. Concurrently, the manuscripts are being digitized with their digital versions appearing in the Hathi Trust Digital Library (HTDL)."

Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Partnership - "The Wellcome Library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina and King's College, London have formed a partnership to create a free searchable on-line catalogue of 500 Islamic manuscripts in the Wellcome Library. A cataloguing system will be designed to create and manage descriptive metadata for Asian manuscripts, as well as a website to enable sophisticated access to the metadata and images."

Yale-SOAS Islamic Manuscript Gallery - "Yale University Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) seek to improve online access to trans-Atlantic collections of digitized manuscripts, manuscript catalogs, and dictionaries by creating a virtual archive, open and freely accessible, for researchers working in the field of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies. This project responds to needs identified in the 2008 Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)report entitled “Review of User Requirements for Digitised Resources in Islamic Studies,” prepared and submitted to JISC by the University of Exeter."

Persian Literature in Translation - "Persian Texts in Translation is a website published by the Packard Humanities Institute. The website contains dozens of Persian texts in translation as well as several digitized secondary sources on Persian literature. The texts can be browsed by author or title and each Persian author is introduced with a short bibliography. Persian titles are available in translation and can be read using a HTML browser. Over 100 works are already available in full-text. The website requires a Java-enabled browser."

Digital Nineveh Archives - "The UC Berkeley Digital Nineveh Archives was initiated in December 2005, and has been made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities initiative, Recovering Iraq's Past. In December 2007 additional support was provided by the British Universities Iraq Consortium. The project, directed by David Stronach and Eleanor Wilkinson, began digitizing only the field records from the University of California at Berkeley Expedition to Nineveh 1987, 1989 and 1990. It has grown to accommodate knowledge contributed by other archaeologists past, present and future, in what has the potential to be first comprehensive archaeological reckoning of the history of the site, from the 19th century through to today."

Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India - A database of G.A. Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India (1904-1928, Calcutta).

Iranshahr Encyclopaedia of Iranian Architectural History - A comprehensive database on the history of architecture and urban development in the Iranian world.