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AP — Israel’s nationwide library says the variety of guests to its Arabic web site greater than doubled final yr, pushed by a rising assortment of digitized supplies and an aggressive outreach marketing campaign to the Arab world.
Round 650,000 customers, predominantly from the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Algeria, visited the Nationwide Library of Israel’s English and Arabic websites in 2021, mentioned library spokesman Zack Rothbart.
One of the vital closely trafficked assets on the Arabic web site is a newspaper archive with greater than 200,000 pages of Arabic publications from Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, mentioned Raquel Ukeles, head of the library’s collections.
“We’ve been engaged on outreach to the Arab world, into the Arabic talking public right here in Israel for over a decade, and we have now slowly constructed up a wealthy set of assets on our web sites,” she mentioned. They embody the digital newspaper archives, manuscripts, posters, digital books and music, she mentioned. They’re open entry, permitting students and curious net browsers to go to.
The Jerusalem library is residence to an intensive assortment of Islamic and Arabic texts, together with 1000’s of uncommon books and manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Turkish starting from the Ninth to the twentieth centuries.
“We’re within the midst of a venture to digitize our total assortment, to scan all of our Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts,” mentioned Samuel Thrope, curator of the library’s Islam and Center East Assortment. “Ninety-five p.c of it has already been accomplished.”
Among the many jewels within the crown of the gathering are a Ninth-century Quran from modern-day Iran with the earliest recognized instance of Persian written within the Arabic script; an illuminated manuscript from seventeenth century India with illustrations of the lifetime of Alexander the Nice; and a sixteenth century Ottoman Turkish textual content on ophthalmology.
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