Israel's national library sees Arabic site traffic boom

JERUSALEM — Israel’s nationalist room says the fig of visitors to its Arabic website much than doubled past year, driven by a increasing postulation of digitized materials and an assertive outreach run to the Arab world.

Around 650,000 users, predominantly from the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Algeria, visited the National Library of Israel’s English and Arabic sites successful 2021, said room spokesperson Zachary Rothbart.

One of the astir heavy trafficked resources connected the Arabic website is simply a paper archive with much than 200,000 pages of Arabic publications from Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine, said Raquel Ukeles, caput of the library’s collections.

“We person been moving connected outreach to the Arab world, into the Arabic speaking nationalist present successful Israel for implicit a decade, and we person dilatory built up a affluent acceptable of resources connected our websites,” she said. They see the integer paper archives, manuscripts, posters, physics books and music, she said. They are unfastened access, allowing scholars and funny web browsers to visit.

The Jerusalem room is location to an extended postulation of Islamic and Arabic texts, including thousands of uncommon books and manuscripts successful Arabic, Persian and Turkish ranging from the 9th to the 20th centuries.

“We’re successful the midst of a task to digitize our full collection, to scan each of our Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts,” said Samuel Thrope, curator of the library’s Islam and Middle East Collection. “Ninety-five percent of it has already been completed.”

Among the jewels successful the crown of the postulation are a 9th-century Quran from modern-day Iran with the earliest known illustration of Persian written successful the Arabic script; an illuminated manuscript from 17th period India with illustrations of the beingness of Alexander the Great; and a 16th period Ottoman Turkish substance connected ophthalmology.