Abstract:
In April 2016, the Israel State Archives announced the most recent stage of an ambitious project to digitize all of their holdings (potentially 400 million pages of material): the new archival website was ready online (Aderet). With the new website came the ability to request digital copies of documents, which would be available on the website within two weeks of the request (Aderet). However, researchers would now at the very least be discouraged from requesting access to the paper documents (Lozowick), or, in the worst-case scenario, be refused access to anything except the website (Baron and Newhall). Local scholars (including a prominent professor of history at Tel Aviv University), the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, and the Middle East Studies Association of North America (which publishes the prestigious International Journal of Middle East Studies) registered concern with the restriction of physical access to the archive and issued public calls for a reversal of the decision (Akevot Institute). The conflict was between perceived best practices of digitization and of archival stewardship (represented by the State Archivist Dr. Yaacov Lozowick) on the one hand, and standards and expectations for scholarly research on the Middle East, which largely depends on archival and rare book collections, on the other.
References
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Bionotes
Dale J. Correa
Dale J. Correa is Head of the Global Studies Team and Middle Eastern Studies Librarian at the University of Texas at Austin, Perry-Castañeda Library. She is also a co-founder of the Endangered Libraries and Archives Committee of the Middle East Librarians Association, and currently leads an initiative through that group to record and recover written cultural heritage that has been lost during the conflict in Syria. In her research, Dr. Correa specializes in Islamic legal theory, theology, philosophy, and Qur'anic studies, with a particular interest in the intellectual tradition of the eastern regions of the Islamicate empire (namely, Transoxania, which is today in Uzbekistan/Tajikistan). Her current project examines the development and flourishing of the Transoxanian approach to testimony, or communication—that is, the transmission of knowledge of a past event by agents over time and space.
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