1) The Special Subject Collection Middle East / North Africa at the Saxony-Anhalt State and University Library, Halle has expired at the end of last year. The Special Subject Collection had first been established at the University Library of Tübingen and from 1998 onwards it continued to exist in Halle.
In 2012 the German Research Foundation (DFG) initiated a transformation process in which the existing Special Subject Collections have been step by step replaced by Specialised Information Services. This process has come to an end for the time being and 21 new Specialised Information Services will be funded by the DFG from 2016 onwards: http://www.dfg.de/en/service/press/press_releases/2015/press_release_no_63/index.html
The Specialised Information Service for Middle Eastern, North African and Islamic Studies (Halle) will be a part of this new information infrastructure. Compared to its predecessor it will have a stronger focus in its acquisition policy on hard to trace print material from the MENA-region. The MENA region includes:
- the Arabic speaking countries (North Africa, Middle East, Arabian Peninsula)
- the Iranian world (Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kurds)
- Turkey (including Cyprus), the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Peoples of the North Caucasus )
- Turkic Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan)
- Horn of Africa
In contrast secondary literature from western publishers will no longer be collected comprehensively like in the past. Such kind of publications is easily accessible in comparison and comes with the standard scope of a library collection. We will nevertheless continue to collect western source editions of Middle East material as well as highly specialised academic publications like conference proceedings.
The Specialised Information Service for Middle Eastern, North African and Islamic Studies will extend its digital activities: Our open access repository MENAdoc will be upgraded to become a publication server for Middle East and Islamic studies. We also intend to implement a new kind of license agreement for German research institutes which allows access to digital Arabic resources.
As a matter of course all research material which has been collected during the past decades in the framework of the Special Subject Collection will continue to be loaned within Germany as an interlibrary loan.
2) You can access the new monthly acquisitions (November and December 2015) of the Special Subject Collection via
https://www.menalib.de/index.php?id=102&L=0
The monthly acquisitions of the newly established Specialised Information Service for Middle Eastern, North African and Islamic Studies will be announced in the same way using the existing classification scheme.
3) Volume 160.2010 of the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft ZDMG is available online.
4) A new online publication in the field of Semitic studies on the renowned scholar Mark Lidzbarski (1868-1928) is available on MENAdoc:
Aufzeichnungen von Mark Lidzbarski (1868–1928) : aus den Nachlässen der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft / Autor Ludmila Hanisch ; aus dem Nachlass herausgegeben von Pierre Motylewicz und Ute Pietruschka ; erstellt am Orientalischen Institut der Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. – [Halle] : Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt, 2015. – Online-Ressource (34 Seiten, 2,194 MB). : Illustrationen, Faksimiles.
http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:gbv:3:5-89711