The first major text-searchable online archive of pre-twentieth-century Arabic printed books
Based on A.G. Ellis’s catalogue of the British Library’s collection, Early Arabic Printed Books from the British Library includes examples from over 400 years of books printed in Arabic script as well as translations into European and Asian languages from the period. Together, they demonstrate Europe’s fascination, study, and assimilation of ideas and knowledge originating in the Arabic-speaking world, with its rich heritage of science, poetry, and Islamic texts.
Scholars can search on the full text of items in Arabic, English, French, German, Latin, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish while also being able to discover content in Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Syriac, and seventeen other languages.
Full-text searching capabilities created with newly developed optical character recognition software (OCR) for early Arabic printed script ensures that scholars in Arabic-speaking countries and those engaged in Arabic studies across the world can equally cross-search Arabic-language materials and research this extensive range of texts.