If you had the necessary resources (time and money) to digitise Arabic periodicals, one should probably start with this #SPARQL query to check #Wikidata for unique holdings: query-chest.toolforge.org/redirect/r9Gn5nKhkWUYgyY...
#ArabPeriodicalStudies […]
This week I have been digging around in the #InternetArchive looking for digitised Arabic periodicals. With a bit of #Rstats and far too many hours with #XSLT and #TEI/XML spent on identifying titles based on the very patchy metadata provided by uploaders, there are quite some exciting finds […]
Does anybody know anything about deduplication at the #InternetArchive? Quite frequently people upload the same files as independent items, which could be prevent by checking against hashes.
See, for example, https://archive.org/details/Om-Alqura which seems to be an exact copy of […]
It is also interesting to see how people spend significant time and effort to download digital facsimiles from academic repositories, edit every image, and upload them to the Internet Archive.
See, for example, scans of البلاغ الاسبوعي published in Cairo from 1926 onwards ( […]
While I thoroughly enjoy the wealth of old Arabic periodicals on the Internet Archive, I am also frustrated by the state of metadata. Why do people laboriously upload thousands of individual issues but provide nothing but the **one-word** title? Don’t they want the material to be found? Is there […]
I’ve just seen this fantastic work worth highlighting during #OAWeek: Somebody is uploading scans of Palestinian periodicals to the @internetarchive at scale […]
I also wrote a #SPARQL quer to see the linguistic composition of the periodical press until 1930 at all locations with titles published in languages of the Eastern Mediterranean: #Arabic, #Ottoman, #Armenian, #Coptic, #Greek, #Farsi, #Ladino, #Azerbaijani […]
Of course a map is nice to have, but a simple table might often be the more useful thing. So I just wrote the #SPARQL to query #Wikidata for all Arabic periodicals published before 1930 with indicators whether there are known holdings and digitised collections. The table allows to quickly search […]
I just added holding information on 100+ Arabic periodicals from the National Library of Israel to #Wikidata (many are marked as belonging “to the Absentee Property Collection (AP)” in the MARC files from the catalogue. This significantly extends the coverage of pre-Nakba Palestinian periodicals […]
