General digital document collections with Middle East content

Authors

Brynjar Lia

Jacob Høigilt

Hathi Trust Digital Library

Huge collection of more than 17 million documents digitized from libraries and archives around the world.

From the website: “Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests. HathiTrust advances its mission and goals through services and programs: HathiTrust Digital Library preserves and provides lawful access to the 17+ million digitized items.”

Qatar Digital Library

A free digital library / archive which “covers modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region, available online for the first time.” Very useful regarding British archival documents on the Gulf. Contains more than 150,000 documents/items.

National Security Archive

Includes a huge collection of declassified U.S. government documents obtained via freedom of information action requests, including the Afghanistan-Taliban Project, Iran-US Relations, Iraq project, The Saddam Hussein Sourcebook and The September 11th Sourcebook.

Wikileaks

Activist website famous for leaking government documents. Examples of relevant collections: The Saudi Cables, The Syria Files, AKP Email archive.

From the website: “WikiLeaks is a multi-national media organization and associated library. It was founded by its publisher Julian Assange in 2006. WikiLeaks specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption. It has so far published more than 10 million documents and associated analyses.”