Thorough research relies on primary, secondary and tertiary sources. Primary sources help the researcher to glance at the phenomenon through records created by or through consultation with people most closely affected by or creators/agents of the studied phenomenon (event, occurrence, or person). Secondary sources include other researchers' work that engage with the same subjects. Secondary sources or scholarly works form a conversation in which the researcher wishes to participate. Tertiary sources---in this libguide referred to as background information---include encyclopedias, lexicons,, and other works, which help the researcher orientate themselves in factual information, or information that can be treated as factual, such as definitions.
Despite the clear distinctions between the types of sources, it is the researcher's prerogative to decide how they treat a source: historiographical studies, which aim to explore the transformation of how scholars approach a topic, for example, can treat scholarly works as primary sources.
For more information about primary and secondary sources, please visit the library's Primary Sources Research Guide.
Harvard’s Islamic Heritage Project (IHP) is a digital collection containing more than 156,000 pages of primary source materials dating from the 10th to the 20th centuries CE. IHP includes over 280 Islamic manuscripts, more than 50 maps, and more than 275 printed texts from Harvard’s renowned library and museum collections.
TIMEA provides online access to texts, maps, and images documenting travel to the Middle East (primarily Egypt) between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These materials range from travel guides, travel narratives, and museum catalogs to stereocards, advertisements, and postcards.To facilitate access and analysis, the texts are fully searchable, and the images are richly described.
The Cairo Genizah is a collection of documents accumulated in the course of centuries as community members of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat today's Cairo's suburb, disposed their records into the genizah, disposal container kept for documents that contain the name of the divine, housed in the synagogue building. The Friedberg Genizah Project (FGP) presents a real revolution in the study and research of the field of Cairo Genizah and Jewish Studies in general. Its main task is to computerize the entire corpus of Genizah manuscripts and Genizah-related materials: images, identifications, catalogs, metadata, transcriptions, translations and bibliographical references. In the course of this project a full digitization of the entire Genizah collections has been done, together with a huge database which is accessible to every scholar and student. The project also introduces new designated tools for Genizah research which are based on advanced technologies of image processing.
The Site was developed by Genazim Digital, headed by Professor Yaacov Choueka. Currently it is supported by the Association for the Study of Jewish Manuscripts.
To use this site, one must register first.
Two collections form the Cambridge University Genizah holdings: the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection and the Jacques Mosseri Genizah Collection. In 1896–97 the Cambridge scholar, Dr Solomon Schechter, with financial help from the Master of St John’s College, Charles Taylor, arrived to examined the Ben Ezra Synagogue's genizah. He received permission from the Jewish community of Egypt to take away what he liked (explaining later, ‘I liked all’), and he brought 193,000 manuscripts back to Cambridge, where they form the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection.
At least from the early 11th century, the Jews of Fusṭāṭ, 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.
Jacques Mosseri , the Cairene businessman assembled the collection name after him. He died prematurely in 1934 and subsequently, his family left Egypt. The collection he amassed was intended to remain in Egypt as part of the Egyptian Jewish community's cultural heritage, however, it became accessible for scholars only in 1970s, when Israel's Jewish National and University Library microfilmed it. The collection of 7000 fragments arrived in Cambridge in 2006for a twenty year-loan.
At the moment, over 30,000 manuscripts from across the Taylor-Schechter, CUL Or. and Jacques Mosseri Collections are available online. More manuscripts are being added on a regular basis.
This digital library includes manuscripts, their transcriptions, and reference S. H. Goitein's research relevant to the individual item. In addition, it offers numerous resources that help learn how to read the Judeo-Arabic texts and acquire additional skills necessary to work with these resources.
The Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) offers free and open access to the rich cultural legacy of the Middle East and North Africa by bringing together collections from a wide range of cultural heritage institutions. Developed by an engineering team from CLIR and Stanford Libraries, the platform federates and makes accessible data about collections from around the world.