Religion: May 2006 Archives

I was recently trying to track down online images of ancient Christian and Jewish manuscripts. I found quite a few imaging projects that are making ancient Mediterranean manuscripts more and more available to the scholar and layperson. The briefly annotated list below highlights some of the more interesting sites I ran across. (By the way, if anyone knows of any other good sites with images of ancient manuscripts, please let me know. Thanks.)

• APIS: Advanced Papyrological Information System--"APIS is a collections-based repository hosting information about and images of papyrological materials (e.g. papyri, ostraca, wood tablets, etc) located in collections around the world." Browse and search the database. Note:Search system gives you the option to "Show records w/images first". The five collections immediately below are included in APIS.
• Center for the Tebtunis Papyri--UC Berkley collection from the town of Tebtunis Egypt. "...largest collection of papyrus texts in the Americas." For images click on "The Collection" and "On-Line Exhibits" on the left-hand side of the page.
  Image Content: from 3rd century BC to 3rd century AD; administrative, legal, business, and religious documents; literary fragments (Homer, Xenophon, Pinder, Euripides)
• Duke Papyrus Archive--Very easy site to navigate. Search or browse by topic or language. Catalog records included with each image.
  Image Content: "1400 papyri from ancient Egypt." Includes Old Testament (used by christians), New Testament, and other early Christian manuscripts
• Princeton University Library Papyrus Homepage--Scroll down the page and click on "Digital Images of Selected Princeton Papyri".
  Image Content: administrative, religious, literary manuscripts in Greek (including New Testament), Latin, Egyptian, Coptic, Arabic
• University of Michigan Papyrus Collection--Well-designed site with lots of information on ancient writing. To see images click on "Exhibits" or "APIS" in menu bar at top..
  Image Content: Greek (including New Testament) and Latin papyri
• Yale Papyrus Collection--Search Yale's Papyrus Collection Database to view images.
  Image Content: many genres, many languages, many locations, many time periods
• Biblical Manuscripts Project--Purpose is to make "high quality images and transcriptions of important Bible manuscripts and early printed editions freely available through the Internet." Scroll down the page for descriptions and links to these excellent images.
  Image Content: New Testament, Old Testament, Hebrew Scriptures
• Catalogue of New Testament Papyri and Codices 2nd--10th Centuries--no images on this site but lots of links and a nice overview of major collections of New Testament manuscripts.
• Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts
  Image Content:very sharp images of New Testament manuscripts.
• Herculaneum Papyri--Search this database of papyri found at Herculaneum, Italy.
  Image Content: Greek literary and philosophical documents
• University of Manchester Image Collections--Amazing images, select "Rylands Genizah" for Hebrew documents or "Rylands Papyri" for Egyptian, Coptic, Arabic, Greek fragments (including classical authors and New Testament). You must turn off your popup blocker.
• New Testament Gateway On-Line Images--Very nice list of links to images on other web sites. Try the "Codex W: Images of Mark" link for very readable images of a New Testament manuscript.
• Online Database of New Testament Manuscripts--Search this database for location and description of New Testament manuscripts held in museums and libraries around the world. This database does NOT contain any images.
• Oxyrhynchus Papyri--Search or browse this database of papyri found at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt.
  Image Content: from 1st century BC to 6th century AD, Greek papyri,wide range of genres including classical authors and New Testament
• West Semitic Research Project--Project at USC. Click on the "Educational Site" link to go to images.
  Image Content: ancient religious documents including pages from Leningrad Codex and Dead Sea Scrolls

--Fred Rowland

Over the past semester alone, the Libraries have acquired more than eighty databases. That's an awful lot of new information to keep up with, even for the librarians! The rapid pace of change means that it can sometimes be difficult to pinpoint the most appropriate database for a specific research need. One way to keep pace is to consult a discipline-specific subject guide. Another, of course, is to frequently read this blog! And so, in the spirit of "keeping up," I offer the following list of...

Full-Text, Primary Source Databases Relevant to the Study of Early America

Books

Early American Imprints, Series 1: Evans (1639-1800)
Early American Imprints, Series 2: Shaw-Shoemaker (1801-1819)
Making of America Books (University of Michigan)
Pennsylvania County Histories to 1900

Google Books
Many important, pre-1900 monographs are available.

American Memory
Several distinct monograph collections from the Library of Congress: California, First-Person Narratives 1849-1900; The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925; Dance Manuals 1490-1900; Nineteenth-Century Books 1850-1877 (see Making of America, above); Puerto Rico Books & Pamphlets 1831-1929; Sunday School Books 1815-1865; Traveling in America 1750-1920; Upper Midwest Books 1820-1910; and Woman Suffrage Books & Pamphlets 1848-1921.

Newspapers

African American Newspapers: The 19th Century
Early American Newspapers, Series 1 (1690-1876)
HarpWeek (1857-1877)
New York Times (1851-present)
Pennsylvania Gazette (1728-1800)
Wall Street Journal (1889-present)

Journals / Magazines

American Periodical Series Online (1740-1900)
Making of America Journals (University of Michigan)

Ephemera

American Civil War Letters & Diaries
Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970
Early Encounters in North America
Gerritsen Collection: Women's History Online, 1543-1945
LexisNexis Congressional with the U.S. Serials Set
Documenting the American South (University of North Carolina)
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000

--David C. Murray

The Encyclopaedia of Islam is a great work of reference covering the many-sided nature of Islam and the Muslim world, with articles on art, history, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and more. The user can browse the alphabetical entries, or peruse and select from the Subjects index or the Names index. Searching options include using English or transliterated terms to query Full Text, Headwords (article entries), Keywords, bibliographies, or Contributors.

• Interested in the famous library at Cordoba created by the Umayyad caliphs that "contained some 4000,000 volumes, described in a catalogue of 44 volumes, each containing 40 leaves"? What was its fate? Check out the article entitled MAKTABA (Arabic for "library").
• What about the spread of Islam in China, where the "military forces [of Kubilay Khan], used for the overunning of both North and South China, were built largely upon the thousands of Muslim soldiers which he brought with him from the Middle Eastern and Central Asian campaigns." Look at the article on CHINA (al-SIN).
• Want to find books and articles on modern Turkey? Search the Bibliography field for "modern turkey" and you'll retrieve the bibliographies of 81 articles. If you're just interested in the early state period, you could add the term "world war" and reduce the set to 5. (You can even search the bibliographies for "temple university" and find that two Temple dissertations have been cited.)
• And what about a comprehensive article on the Koran (al-KURAN), with sections on Etymology and Synonyms, Muhammad and the Kuran, History of the Kuran After 632, Structure, Chronology of the Text, Language and Style, Literary Forms and Major Themes, The Kuran in Muslim Life and Thought, and Translation of the Kuran?

The Encyclopaedia of Islam covers the main precepts of Islam at the same time that it reveals the rich interplay between Islam and other world civilizations going all the way back to the late antique world. This encyclopedia will prove very useful, whether you're studying the core of Islam or just nibbling at the interdisciplinary edges.

There are some challenges, however, that the user needs to deal with. For one, you will need to download Brill fonts for handling Arabic terms in transliteration. You can find links to the fonts in the upper right corner of the main search page. For serious scholars and students of Islam the many Arabic terms are one of the encyclopedia's great advantages. For the uninitiated, however, it does take some getting used to (but after a little while it becomes fun).

Don't wait. Check out the Encyclopaedia of Isalm today!

BTW, more good news: the second edition of The Encyclopedia Judaica will be released in the fall in print and online (as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library). I hope we can get both versions. This will fill a big gap as we do not currently have a major online Jewish/Judaism encyclopedia.

--Fred Rowland

With the help of our excellent student workers in the Reference and Instructional Services Department, I carried out a small study of Google Book Search (GBS). Curious to know just how deep it was with regards to philosophy, I took a random sample of 381 titles out of the 4244 philosophy titles Temple bought between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2005. It turns out that 35% of the philosophy books sampled are contained in GBS, including the following percentages from a number of top academic publishers:

• 39% of Oxford (21/54)
• 66% of Routledge (25/38)
• 70% of Blackwell (7/10)
• 76% of SUNY (13/17)
• 88% of Cambridge (28/32)

None of the books in my sample from Harvard (5), Cornell (8), MIT(5), Princeton (3), Stanford (3), or Yale (4) university presses were found, although books from all these publishers do show up in GBS (the Advanced Search allows a publisher search). Sample books from the large European academic presses Ashgate (9), Brill (3), Continuum (5), and Palgrave MacMillan (7) also did not turn up. With the exception of Brill, this latter group does not appear to be participating in GBS.

According to Google, books make it into GBS through two different routes, as part of the Partner Program or the Library Project. With the Partner Program, publishers (or authors) provide GBS with the full-text of books. Presumably, most are using this service as a means of marketing their books. By contrast, for the Library Project GBS scans in books from a number of major research libraries like those at Harvard, Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, and the New York Public Library.

Depending on the copyright status of a book and on the agreements between publishers and Google, there are four different views of books that users see--the Snippet View, Sample Pages View, and Full View, and No Preview Available (which I ran into a number of times but for which Google gives no explanation).

• The Snippet View shows your keyword(s) in a few sentences of context. Books showing this view come from the Library Project and are still under copyright.
• All the books in my sample presented the Sample Pages View. These books come from either the Partner Program or the Library Project. On the search results screen, books showing the Sample Pages View will contain the label Limited Preview. In either case, the publisher has given permission to display only a certain portion of the work. Many of the pages in this view will either require a login (free to set up), or will be inaccessible. For instance, when I searched inside the book Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief for "wagner", six pages required login and six were inaccessible. (Of course, you are only asked to log in once per session.)
• Full View books are entirely accessible. And whereas you can't print pages out from the Snippet View or the Sample Pages View, you can print out pages from Full View books. You can also limit your search to just Full View books. These works either come from the Library Project and are in the public domain, or the author or publisher has given permission to view an entire copyrighted work.
• No Preview Available books look a lot like the Snippet View except without the snippet. These probably come in as part of the Library Project and, appropriately, look a bit like library catalog records.

It is important to remember that despite which view you're given, your search is querying the full-text of these books, not just the the book record as you would with, say, a library catalog. It's also important to remember that Google intends this as a search service that will allow users to identify books that they will eventually borrow from libraries or buy in bookstores. It's not meant as a provider of electronic books. Clearly, there are enough philosophy books in Google Book Search to make it a useful tool of discovery. Among its many uses are citation searching, identifying an obscure person, place, thing, or event, or just plain old full-text searching. Next time you're doing philosophy research (or any other kind of research), try it out.

BTW, Temple has quite a few subscription databases of full-text searchable books that might be of interest to the student of philosophy, some of which are listed below:

• ACLS HIstory E-Book Project
• Earlty English Books Online
• Gale Virtual Reference Library
• NetLibrary
• NetLibrary Reference Center
• Oxford Reference Online.

Temple now has access to the premier database for medievalists, The International Medieval Bibliography Online (IMB), which contains over 300,000 articles in thirty different languages. The articles come from journals, conference proceedings, essay collections, and festschriften chosen by a “worldwide network of fifty teams to ensure regular coverage of 4,500 periodicals and a total of over 5,000 miscellany volumes”. Extensive indexing--including separate indexes for subjects, people, places, repositories, and time periods--allows for precise searching. The IMB covers the period from 300 to 1500 CE and the geographic regions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, making it relevant to scholars of classics, religion, philosophy, art and archaeology, history, literature, and Islamic studies.

In addition to the IMB, here are some other electronic resources relevant to the study of various aspects of the Middle Ages:

Encyclopedias:

• Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages;
• Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium;
• Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance;
• Encyclopedia of Philosophy;
• Encyclopedia of Religion;
• New Catholic Encyclopedia;
• New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Databases:

• ITER: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance;
• Index Islamicus;
• ATLA--the database of the American Theological Library Association;
• Bibliography of the History of Art;
• Philosopher’s Index;
• MLA International Bibliography--the database of the Modern Language Association.

--Fred Rowland