MIT closing three of its four libraries is shocking and appalling and underscores that the source of so much of the crisis in higher education comes not from attacks from the far right or the collapse of public trust, but rather from the university administrative class itself.

i keep saying that genAI is not about "democratizing information," and it is NOOOOT anti-IP. it's an attempt at information enclosure, it's the mother of all would-be IP landlords. what they want is to crowd out free available information, control what remains, and then charge us for it

The only fellow researcher in Dar al-Kutub one day before eid:

Die bequeme Sorge um die Wissenschaftsfreiheit Die Debatte über Wissenschaftsfreiheit boomt. Doch oft bleiben ausgerechnet jene außen vor, deren Fächer zeigen, wo die Freiheit der Wissenschaft unter Druck steht. Ein Gastbeitrag von Jannis Grimm. Im Wiarda-Blog lesen: www.jmwiarda.de/blog/2026/05...

I wrote a blog post for the Leiden Special Collections. A new update of the Audition Certificate Platform will be available in the first week of June. www.leidenspecialcollectionsblog.nl/articles/map...

A dozen female Palestinians are working to save and preserve medieval and early modern manuscripts 📕 from the Al-Omari mosque’s library. Hang this picture in the Louvre (and the Met). www.newarab.com/features/ins...

Some things never change, Victor Édouard Dor (L'instruction publique en Égypte, Paris 1872, p. 250) about visiting the Khedival Library, now Egyptian National Library/Dar al-Kutub:

An important update for applicants in our MA in Ottoman history. Deadline is 27 April! Downloadable links here: www.academia.edu/165671803/UP...

Auftakt der Reihe „Schätze des Wissens“: Was erzählen arabische Handschriften über Gesellschaft und Geschichte? Forscher geben Einblicke in die Bestände der @stabiberlin.bsky.social. Mit Simultanübersetzung. 14.04., 18 Uhr, Der Divan, Berlin-Zehlendorf. Anmeldung erbeten t1p.de/b42fq

Germany and Turkey have a centuries-long shared history, "yet when Turkish workers arrived in Germany in the 1960s, it vanished from view. It did not fit the image of the underprivileged “guest worker” – nor the cliched view of Turkey. In many ways, that remains true today." - Carolin Würfel.

Man kommt nicht hinterher: Jetzt greift Wolfram Weimer auch noch defacto die Sammlungs- und Dokumentationspflicht der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek an. Will diese Bundesregierung gerade Kultur komplett plattmachen? www.deutschlandfunk.de/geplanter-er...

Wichtiger Appell zur Öffnung der Unternehmensarchive. Die Überführung der Privatarchive in staatliche Institutionen allein reicht nicht aus, wenn Gatekeeping fortgeführt wird. Die Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft bestimmt etwa nach wie vor, wer Zugang zum DOG-Archiv im Zentralarchiv der SMB haben darf.

Update: In a statement, Bonn University confirms the renaming of the Otto Spies Memorial Series because of the archival material I quoted in my blogpost. In the meantime, the local newspaper Bonner General-Anzeiger published an article on the issue as well. www.ioa.uni-bonn.de/isl/de/nachr...

We published version 5.0 of the Audition Certificate Platform today. It now includes 5560 annotated certificates: www.audition-certificates-platform.org

It is difficult to know how to go about explaining to students that this series was named—in 2015!—for a member of the Nazi Party who was writing things like: 2/3

This is really startling! I have found that Bonn's memorial lecture series and publication provides accessible introductions to topics at the forefront of research in Ottoman studies. For Monday I had even assigned Faroqhi's contribution on Ottoman slavery to an intro course I am teaching. 1/3

I wrote a blog post explaining why I consider an honour for the orientalist Otto Spies (1901-1981) problematic, based on correspondence I examined in Berlin this summer: disorient.de/magazin/trot...

On the construction and practice of "ordinary" Islam through the lens of one eighteenth century Ottoman traveler and his encounter with a rather unusual saint's shrine in Homs:

Library studies at its best!

My first peer-reviewed article, based on my BA thesis at FU Berlin, has just been published (OA). It traces Palestinian libraries from the late Ottoman period in the so-called Abandoned Property Collection (NLI). Thank you to everyone who supported! doi.org/10.1353/mns.... @sims-mss.bsky.social

The Hellmut Ritter memorial stone, situated above the German military cemetery in Tarabya. Created in 1986 by Bern Pielemeier at the initiative of Traugott Fuchs. Today, the once open view of the Bosphorus has become overgrown (as the stone itself will be overgrown soon).

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

One of the best archival experiences for me so far has been the Archive of the Turkish Historical Society in Ankara (Türk Tarih Kurumu Arşivi). After my request, they send me within in 24 hours all documents related to my research as pdf and jpg file for free via fileshare.

I always wondered how the Ottoman budget for the year 1904-5 found it's way to the Leiden Special collection. Turns out it might be from the library of Sultan Murad V. "formally bought by Cense [former head of the NIT Istanbul] personally to avoid problems with Turkish customs authorities" in 1962:

It is intriguing to note that parts of these manuscripts were lost to the flames during the destruction of the Leuven library in 1940. One can’t help but wonder what the collectors who transferred antiquities to Europe, often self-identified "saviours", would have to say about it.

Still a very nice introduction to get a sense of what has been done in languages other than english before 2000:

I'm feeling a new love for a clumsy sentence or a misspelled word. I imagine a human on the other end. Doing their own typing, like the old days. I'm thinking about styles of writing that might emerge from this-- analogues to a guacamole I once saw advertised as "hand hacked" at a fancy restaurant.

“The Lebanese label produced hundreds, if not thousands, of recordings in Berlin up until the eve of World War II.” Anna-Theresa Bachmann and Hannah El-Hitami explore the history of Baidaphon for @newlinesmag.bsky.social

My word autocorrection on the state of German Ottoman scholarship:

Jan Schmidt on his work as a cataloguer of the Turkish manuscripts at John Rylands University Library, Manchester:

Important thread on the smuggle of Papyrus bilinguis 1, currently still in the holdings of @stabihh.bsky.social Why is there no public debate in Hamburg about ethical responsibilities today? @juergenzimmerer.bsky.social @spiegel.de @zeit.de @recherche.ndr.de @ndr.de

Once a hub of Ottoman culture, Süleyman Efendi’s library was scattered by conquest. In our PhD Research Series, Rawda El-Hajji traces these manuscripts, showing how they help reconstruct lost intellectual communities and reveal the fate of cultural heritage in times of conflict: uhh.de/csmc-el-hajji

50. Read PhD and MA theses when you are doing research. There is so much great scholarship by people who never got the opportunity to publish their research as a book.

74. Historians should share sources more. Like, actually give colleagues sources that you found so they can use them.

Man könnte sagen - alles kalter Kaffee, aber Jens Spahn hat sich als Fraktionsvorsitzender in die Pole Position für die nächste Kanzlerkandidatur gebracht. Auch bei diesem Vorgang stellt sich, wie auch bei der Maskenaffäre die Frage - für wen arbeitet Jens Spahn? Für sich oder für die Bürger*innen?

Much of what we know about everyday reading practices in #Arabic writing cultures comes from audition certificates. We make these valuable #manuscripts accessible to research on an online platform. A new version now offers #OpenAccess to over 5000 sources: uhh.de/csmc-acp

AI bot scrapers are hitting every site on the web in search of training data. This report is the first good attempt to evaluate the impact of these AI scrapers, especially on smaller institutions that are trying to make their collections open to the public www.404media.co/ai-scraping-...

The 2nd phase of the #Qalamos project also focuses on the retro-conversion of catalogues describing Ottoman-Turkish manuscripts. These consist of five vols. that were created during the project #KOHD. They comprise exclusively manuscripts from the holdings of @stabiberlin.bsky.social. .

Weekend inspiration from the Robert Anhegger (1911-2001) archive, Leiden University Library, Cod. Or. 26.621 (13)

The 2025 Winter School on Reading and Analysing Ottoman Manuscript Sources took place this week at IMS/FORTH, in Rethymno, with great success. A wonderful experience for all!

One of the many perks of my job is having the time to read and review important books. Recently, I dived into Sebastian Willert's 2024 publication on the translocation of archaeological artefacts from the Ottoman Empire to Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The edited volume The Library of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār has been published (open access; Brill: 2025: brill.com/display/titl...). I contributed to the project by identifying 5 manuscripts from al-Jazzār's library in the so-called AP (“abandoned property") collection of the National Library of Israel.

You may have heard about him on the radio recently. It's time to continue working through new biographical material on the collector Friedrich Grote, who cultivated contacts with Prussian cultural functionaries to help them extract cultural artefacts from the Middle East. medisi.hypotheses.org/3860

Alright *cracks knuckles* let's do this! Today I'm inaugurating an episodic Monday series titled History of Islamic Art in 100 Objects. But we have to ask the most important question first: What is Islamic art? Also, why is this even a question? 🧵 #IslamicArt100Objects

www.aucegypt.edu/news/auc-lib... Colleagues at AUC, IAS, NYU, Princeton, Umich, and cofc came together to make this happen. Proud of their work and of my husband Garrett Davidson who made it happen.