LibGuides: MENA Databases: Archives, Primary Sources, and Documents

These databases provide digital version of archival materials, including government documents, personal accounts, field notes, and newspaper articles.

Other Useful Guides

Newspapers and Magazines as Primary Sources
A tutorial which guides you through the use of periodicals as primary sources for your research
Archival Use for Middle Eastern Scholarship
In-depth coverage of primary source collections related to the Middle East
African History - Digitized Primary Source Collections
In-depth coverage of primary source collections related to Africa

Databases

Empire Online This link opens in a new window
This resource brings together manuscript, printed and visual primary source materials for the study of 'Empire' and its theories, practices and consequences. The materials span across the last five centuries and are accompanied by a host of secondary learning resources including scholarly essays, maps and an interactive chronology.
Foreign Office Files for the Middle East This link opens in a new window
This collection is an essential resource for understanding the events in the Middle East during the 1970s. It addresses the policies, economies, political relationships and significant events of every major Middle East power. Conflicts such as the Arab-Israeli War, the Lebanese Civil War and the Iranian Revolution are examined in detail, as are the military interventions and peace negotiations carried out by regional and foreign powers like the United States and Russia.
Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan This link opens in a new window
Foreign Office Files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, 1947-1980 consists of the complete run of documents in the series DO 133, DO 134 and FCO 37, as well as all documents covering the Indian subcontinent in the FO 371 series. Events covered include independence and partition, the Indian annexation of Hyderabad and Goa, war between India and Pakistan, tensions and war between India and China, the consolidation of power of the Congress Party in India, military rule in Pakistan, the turbulent independence of Bangladesh and the development of nuclear weapons in the region.
Confidential Print: Middle East This link opens in a new window
The collection covers Middle Eastern history from 1839-1969; countries included are: Afghanistan, Egypt, Sudan, Persia, Suez Canal, Turkey, Jordan, Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Syria. The series originated out of a need for the British Government to preserve all of the most important papers generated by the Foreign and Colonial Offices. Some of these were one page letters or telegrams -- others were large volumes or texts of treaties. All items marked 'Confidential Print' were circulated to leading officials in the Foreign Office, to the Cabinet, and to heads of British missions abroad.
Confidential Print: Africa This link opens in a new window
Provides electronic access to the United Kingdom's Colonial, Dominion and Foreign Offices' confidential correspondence relating to Africa between 1834 and 1966. This resource provides a searchable collection of scores of official documents and maps covering almost the entire period of European conquest and colonisation of Africa (with the exception of Egypt).

Usage

Booleans

Archives Direct's advanced search provides multiple fields for separate search terms. The boolean relationship between search one search term and others is defined by a drop down menu to the right of each field. Each field supports AND, OR, and NOT relationships. These same terms can also be used within search boxes, and are detected whether or not they are lowercase.

Stemming

The "Word Stemming" option allows you to stem each of your search terms to broaden your search results. For more information on word stemming, see Stanford Natural Language Processing's page on the topic.

Other

Archives Direct allows you to tailor specific search boxes to specific metadata fields. The fields you can choose from are:

Title
Reference
People
Places
Topics

Archives Direct also allows you to filter your entire search by other categories, such as Date, Collection, and Region.

Databases

Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) This link opens in a new window
A multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century; comprised of numerous collections to be released over many years. Includes a variety of material types: monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more--in one cross-searchable location.
Middle East Online: Arab-Israeli Relations, 1917-1970 This link opens in a new window
Fully searchable database of primary source documents from the British National Archives that chronicle the politics, wars, administration, and diplomacy surrounding the Palestine Mandate and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Topics covered include the background to the establishment of the State of Israel, Black September, the Border wars of the 1950s, the British capture of Jerusalem, the Cold War in the Middle East, the formation of the United Arab Republic, Jewish terror groups, and milestones in the Palestine-Zionist tension and their impact on British policy leading to the Partition of 1948.
Middle East Online: Iraq, 1914-1974 This link opens in a new window
Fully searchable database of original source material from the British Government files on the Middle East from the National Archives of the UK. Offers a broad range of material from the Foreign Office, Colonial Office, War Office and Cabinet Papers covering the period from the beginning of the First World War and the Anglo-Indian landing in Basra in 1914, through the British Mandate in Iraq of 1920-32, and to the rise of Saddam Hussein in 1974.

Usage

Gale Primary Sources advanced search interface

Booleans

Gale Primary Sources' advanced search, like Archives Direct, compartmentalizes each search term into its own box, with boolean relationships between terms defined with drop-down menus to the left of each box. Also like Archives Direct, it supports AND, OR, and NOT. These terms are detected, upper- or lowercase, inside individual search boxes.

Other

Beneath the search boxes, there is a check-box which allows you to "Allow variations". Selecting this box will match variant spellings of words or phrases which may appear in historical documents.

Additionally, you can narrow both individual search boxes and the search as a whole by various criteria, though these criteria vary from resource to resource. They will be noted in individual entries below.

Border and Migration Studies Online This link opens in a new window
This collection of text, images, and videos explores and provides historical background on more than thirty key worldwide border areas, including: U.S. and Mexico; the European Union; Afghanistan; Israel; Turkey; The Congo; Argentina; China; Thailand; and others.

Usage

Border and Migration Studies Online has a complex search interface which is difficult to detail fully here. This is a brief gloss of the major features.

The advanced search provides over a dozen categorized boxes which allow you to narrow your search based on keywords or categories of many different types. Some of these categories accept any search terms - others only accept certain specific terms. For those latter categories, a helpful menu is provided to the right of the search box, which is accessed by clicking "Select terms". This menu lets you choose from a list of valid terms.

The results of searches done within Border and Migration Studies Online can also be treated as a group of documents to be searched within. However, your search options for these subsequent searches are more limited, the same as the site's basic search.

Booleans

Boolean support for this search engine is not documented. However, it does appear to support AND, OR, and NOT keywords (based on testing). It does not appear to be possible to define boolean relationships between different search boxes, so they are assumed to be additive (AND connects each search box's conditions, meaning they all must be met).

Other

Border and Migration Studies Online also allows you to specify your search by a number of other categories that do not have associated search boxes. These are:

Collection
Date
Area of Interest
Format
Language
Content Type
Source Type (primary or secondary)

Finally, you can choose how to sort your search results. You can sort by:

Relevance - more relevant results first (default)
Title - alphabetical sort
Newest first
Oldest first

Useful Links

Search Tips - Alexander Street
A help page provided by the publishers of Border and Migration Studies Online which provides further hints for using their search engine.

African Newspapers, Series I and II This link opens in a new window
African Newspapers, Series 1 and 2, 1800-1925, offers coverage of the people, issues and events that shaped the continent during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Featuring titles from Algeria to Angola, Zambia to Zimbabwe, this resource chronicles the evolution of Africa through eyewitness reporting, editorials, legislative information, letters, poetry, advertisements, obituaries and other items.

Usage

African Newspapers is a sub-collection of Readex's World Newspaper Archive. When using this database, make sure to only search the African Newspaper collections. To specify this, click the grey box above the advanced search interface that says "Searching [0-5] of 5 databases", and select only those databases you are interested in.

World Newspaper Archive advanced search interface

Booleans

AND, OR, and NOT are supported both within individual search boxes and between boxes, using drop down menus to the left of each search box. The topmost search box does not have a boolean menu - if it is the only box filled, it must be matched.

Other

Each search box can be made to specifically target a certain metadata field using the drop down menu to the left of the box. The options are:

Full text
Headline
Publication
Date
Citation Text (unclear what kind of citation text this is actually searching)
All text (unclear what the difference between this and Full text is - may include metadata as well)
Place of publication

Additionally, one can narrow their search to a certain date range.

Finally, there are basic sorting options. These are:

Best - more rlevant results appear first
Oldest
Newest