The extensive Tibetan literature in American collections was collected over the past century and a half by explorers, missionaries, diplomats, and scholars. Because Tibetan literature was largely copied and published in woodblock prints and loose-leaf collections, many of the texts are incomplete. Pages of a single manuscript volume may be found in several libraries, for example at Yale and in Newark Museum. By cataloging these collections, TBRC hopes to recompile these collections using the facilities of the web. The Works at the Library of Congress, comprising more than 3,000 volumes came to into the collections from the consul William Woodville Rockhill, Berthold Laufer, Joseph Rock, Matthew Kapstein, and Tshering Thar during the period 1899-1996. In addition, there are miscellaneous purchases and gifts. The content of these Works are little known because of their relative obscurity inside the Library of Congress. The subjects covered include philosophy, medicine, art, psychology, alchemy, astrology, poetics, and history and include rare and important examples that should ideally be incorporated into the larger digital library TBRC is developing.

The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, is one of the pre-eminent natural history institutions in the world, a leader in scientific research and a pioneer in museum exhibition and education in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, geology, paleontology and zoology. The text and image archives in the Library document the professional work of distinguished scientists like Franz Boas, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Margaret Mead and Ernst Mayr, naturalists like Theodore Roosevelt and John Burroughs, and extraordinary, yet still not widely known, artists like Carl Akeley and Charles Knight. They tell stories of field and lab work to develop collections, exhibitions and educational programs as exploration led to the study of new places, other peoples and countless animal species. Created from the mid 19th to the early 21st centuries, the content of the collections begins in geological time and continues to the present. Scholars and writers research the archival collections for publication in theses, dissertations, scholarly journals, magazines, trade and children’s books; filmmakers gather material for documentaries and TV productions; and artists, in growing numbers, reference it as a resource and inspiration for their work. The number of archival researchers has tripled over the past ten years reflecting the growing importance and relevance of natural science research and exploration and their fascinating history.

The Underwood & Underwood Egypt Stereoviews digital collection includes 101 images of Egypt commissioned by the Underwood & Underwood publishing company in the 1890s. The photographs, originally sold as a boxed sets, document 19th century Egyptian culture and the history of travel in the Middle East. The wide geographic scope of its subjects spanning along the Nile River, the Suez Canal towns and the Egyptian deserts render a thorough introductory visual representation of Egypt as opposed to the contemporaneous amateur and subjectively compiled albums of its time. Of particular interest are the brief descriptions and the six language translated captions on the back of each card which, content wise, often contain inaccuracies that may be interpreted as colonial approaches on the part of the publishing company.

The Underwood & Underwood Egypt Stereoviews were originally purchased by American University in Cairo President Richard F. Pedersen in 1985. Two years later, Pedersen expanded the collection by purchasing the full set of stereoscope slides. The stereoviews were digitized and described by the Rare Books and Special Collections Library in May and June 2012.

The Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library is the world's largest and most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts. For a thousand years, the Jewish community of Fustat (Old Cairo), placed their worn-out books and other writings in a storeroom (genizah) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, and in 1896–97 the Cambridge scholar, Dr Solomon Schechter, with financial help from the Master of St John’s College, Charles Taylor, arrived to examine it. He received permission from the Jewish community of Egypt to take away what he liked (explaining later, ‘I liked it all’), and he brought 193,000 manuscripts back to Cambridge, where they form the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection.

The storeroom where the manuscripts were stored by the community of Fustat was a genizah, a sacred storeroom. According to rabbinic law (see, for instance, Mishna Shabbat 16:1), once a holy book can no longer be used (because it is too old, or because its text is no longer relevant) it cannot be destroyed or casually discarded: texts containing the name of God should be buried or, if burial is not possible, placed in a genizah.

At least from the early 11th century, the Jews of Fustat, one of the most important and richest Jewish communities of the Mediterranean world, reverently placed their old texts in the Genizah. Remarkably, however, they placed not only the expected religious works, such as Bibles, prayer books and compendia of Jewish law, but also what we would regard as secular works and everyday documents: shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, pages from Arabic fables, works of Sufi and Shi'ite philosophy, medical books, magical amulets, business letters and accounts, and hundreds of letters: examples of practically every kind of written text produced by the Jewish communities of the Near East can now be found in the Genizah Collection, and it presents an unparalleled insight into the medieval Jewish world.

Alongside the T-S Collection, Cambridge University Library is also now the home of the Jacques Mosseri Genizah Collection. Assembled by the successful Cairene businessman, Jacques (Jack) Mosseri in the first decade of the twentieth century, these manuscripts were intended to remain in Egypt as part of the Jewish community’s cultural heritage. However, after Mosseri’s premature death in 1934 and his family’s subsequent departure from Egypt, his eponymous collection disappeared from scholarly view until the 1970s, when it was microfilmed by a team from the Jewish National and University Library. Following recent discussions with members of the Mosseri family, in 2006 this 7000-fragment collection came to Cambridge University Library on a 20-year loan. During its stay in Cambridge, the Mosseri Collection will be conserved and digitised, and a new, detailed catalogue produced.

At the moment, over 18,000 manuscripts from across the Taylor-Schechter, CUL Or. and Jacques Mosseri Collections are available online, including a substantial number of documents (letters and legal deeds) and liturgical texts (the fruits of a joint project with Ben Gurion University). More manuscripts will be added on a regular basis, until the entire Cambridge Genizah Collection is online.

Historically, the term genizah commonly refers to an informal storage area where fragile Jewish documents, considered religiously significant, but ritually unfit, are put away until they are brought to a cemetery for dignified burial. The trove of over 350,000 medieval manuscript fragments once held in the attic genizah of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, dating from the 9th century CE and spanning over a thousand years, is the most famous and important of the extant collections. Its contents - so-called Cairo genizah fragments, which came to light during the 19th century - subsequently were scattered around the world. Some appeared on and then disappeared from the antiquities market; the largest segment went to Cambridge University, where they became the object of intensive scholarly study.

In the late 1990s, thanks to a significant gift from a Penn alum named Jeffrey Keil, W' 65 and PAR '91, Penn initiated a project, in collaboration with Cambridge University Libraries, to apply digital technologies to discover new intellectual matches among these physically dispersed fragments. Through this initiative we were able to demonstrate how digital technologies may serve as discovery tools to identify matches among a global diaspora of thousands of fragments of medieval manuscripts (see: http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/genizah/index.cfm). This collection of Cairo genizah fragments consists of Penn manuscripts that were part of this project.

Villages of Sulaimani 1960-1980

The Tahrir Documents Project was established by Levi Thompson, Cameron Hu, Elias Saba and Emily Drumsta with the aim to digitize, translate, and post online printed discourse collected during and after popular demonstrations of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Established in the spring, the group grew into a review board with approximately ninety volunteer translators located in Egypt and abroad. The Tahrir Documents project was not affiliated with any of the groups or authors whose works appear with translations on the website, or with any foreign or domestic organization. From March 2011 to May 2012, the group continuously worked to scan and translate collected documents with the aim of sharing them with the public. Over five hundred scanned documents, diverse in both type and content, were published alongside partial to complete translations on the group's website, tahrirdocuments.org.

Project flyers, newspapers, and other ephemera were obtained from and around Midan Tahrir, epicenter of the Egyptian Revolution. The collection contains over 500 items Arabic language, including poetry, personal essays, advertisements, missives, political party communications, protest flyers, and activist newspapers. Among these are: guidelines for moral conduct post-revolution, announcements of new political parties and presidential candidates, articles debating the details of constitutional amendments, and sections from activist newspapers including Gurnal and Revolutionary Egypt.

The collection was donated to the UCLA Library by Levi Thompson, Cameron Hu, Elias Saba, and Emily Drumsta in 2012.

Collection of Armenian

This fonds consists of digital copies of photographs owned by Amir Behzadi, created as part of the EAP001 project 'Faces and Places in Iran: Iranian Photography at the Turn of the 20th Century'. A sample of his collection was digitised.

The collection consists of photographs taken in and around the city of Bam in the Iranian province of Kerman, during the Qajar and Pahlavi I periods [c1880-1941]. Amir Behzadi does not know the provenance, context or subjects of most of the collection, and so information presented here is necessarily incomplete.

The sample digitised by the project consists of 15 photographs, all individual or group portraits. The subjects include families, and groups of men in what appear to be official uniforms. The sample also includes four images of handwritten texts and ink stamps, which may be accompanying documentation to the photographs, or may be images of the backs of the photographs.

Digital images of two manuscripts from the private collection of Usman Hataul. The manuscripts detail the stories of hikayat Nur Muhammad and Muhammad Hanafiyah (lithograph).