New OA resource: al-sharekh archive

"AlSharekh Archive: 228 Arabic journals, 277,000 articles by 46,281 writers 

Access to the archive is open to all via the AlSharekh Archive website https://archive.alsharekh.org 

AlSharekh Archive from Sakhr, is one of the most distinguished Arabic digitization initiatives. It is the first and only one to focus on the content of literary journals providing online access to the content of 228 Arabic literary journals, from 23 Arab countries, dating from the early Arab renaissance (al Nahda) in the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twenty-first century. 

Among the journals are Arab renaissance journals such as Al-Muqtataf, Al-Muqtabas, Al-Hilal, Al-Adib, Al-Ustadh, Al-Mashriq, Al-Jamaa and others. Authors of the journal articles include prominent Arab writers such as Gerji Zidan, Taha Hussein, Yaqub Sarrouf, Hafez Ibrahim, Albert Adeeb and many others. 

The AlSharekh Archive s’ site is very easy to use and navigate. Users can browse the journal issues or search the metadata indexes of the articles. Journal articles are viewed as images and have not been converted into digital texts because of difficulties in Arabic OCR. 

Some characteristics of the Archive: 

● It is the first Arabic digital library focusing on literary journals. Most of the others mostly cover resources related to Islamic heritage. 

● The website and the content are accessible free of charge. Access is provided to more than a million pages of Arabic literary work, otherwise hidden on bookshelves. 

● The journals are listed on the site according to the country of publishing, which helps in documenting the publishing movement at the country level. 

● Journal issues are organized and displayed in chronological order making it easy to access the specified number and the required article. 

● The Table of Content in each issue of a journal provides links to the pdf of the articles on the list. 

● Articles are accessed in their original form as in the print issues. 

● The search box on the site allows searching by the article’s author, title ,and by the title of the journal. 

● Brief author biographies, and bibliographic information about the journals are also provided. 

Procedures to protect copyright are mentioned in the preamble on the first page of the Archives website. It should be noted that many journals in the Archives are outdated and not subject to intellectual property law. 

Fatme Charafeddine, American University of Beirut"