1. Concerning Exploration of Sources

Libraries, Archives, Museums

• Atif Efendi Library - the library was founded in 1741by Atif Mustafa Efendi, who was the accountant of Sultan Mahmud I and also a poet. The collection has 28,000 books including the poetry collection of Nefi, miniature books and seal albums.
• Ottoman Archives of the Prime Ministry - these archives are extremely rich but the materials in it are still being assorted and classified. Those that have been already classified are opened to researchers. 
• People's Library - this library was established in 1916 with the donation of more than 16,000 rare books that made up the collection of Ali Emiri Efendi. Today the collection includes 9,000 handwritten works and 30,000 books in Arabic script. 
• Istanbul University Central Library - the collections includes books that belonged to the Committee for Union and Progress written in Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Armenian and other languages. It also includes unpublished thesis, maps and photograph albums from the Ottoman period. The library has several catalogues and Library is working on full computerized search.
• Koprulu Library - the library was established in 1667 by Fazil Ahmet Koprulu. The building is the first Ottoman building designed intentionally to be a library. It contains books in Turkish, Arabic and Persian both in handwriting and in print, as well as maps of waterways. The material in Arabic is open to the public.
• Istanbul Archeology Museums Library - the library was established at the beginning of the 20th century. Besides books on archeology, the library has a collection of 80,000 books written in several languages as well as handwritten scripts.
• Topkapi Palace Museum Library - the library has a collection of 13,450 handwritten scripts in Turkish, Persian and Arabic but also miniature books written in Greek, Latin, Armenian, Serbian, Hebrew and Syrian. The library has also albums of seals and maps. The printed material can be photocopied and the handwritten scripts are also available in microfilm, photography and diapositive.
• Nurosmaniye Library - this library was established in 1755 and it contains books that belonged to Sultan Mahmud I and Sultan Osman III. Currently the library has a collection of 7,600 rare books.
• Ragip Pasha Library - the library was established in 1762 and contains mainly books on Islam but also books on history, literature and sciences. Most of the books are in Arabic. There are 1,274 handwritten scripts and 1,704 books in the old alphabet. The library is affiliated with the Suleymaniye Library.
• Suleymaniye Library - the library was established in 1918 and it contains 109 collections of rare books that belonged to foundations and dervish lodges from numerous regions of Anatolia. There are a total of 115,000 books of which 67,000 are handwritten. Catalog search at the library is computerized and microfilm services are available.
• Archives of Evil Deeds Records (Seriyye Sicilleri Arsivleri Seriye Sicilleri Arsivleri) -in these archives are the records of the sentences passed by the judges in the courts of evil deeds of the Ottoman Empire. There is a total of 9,883 registers and the time period they cover is from 1483 to 1924.
• Ataturk Library - the library was opened in 1931, but the work on assortment and classification still continues. The library contains 24,803 books in Turkish; 11,903 books in Ottoman; 68,026 books in foreign languages; 3,614 handwritten scripts; 14,547 volumes of periodicals; 320 calendars; 272 maps; 44 atlases and 13 Korans.
• Istanbul Library - the library was established in 1990 by the Celik Gulersoy Foundation. The current collection is rich in gravures, postcards and photographs. It has a total of 8,100 works.

Learned Societies

By exploring the web pages of the learned societies you may be able to reach relevant secondary sources or their bibliographic records. For access to the primary sources you have to avisit the societies yourself.

• French Institute of Anatolian Studies (http://www.ifea-istanbul.net/) has a rich collection of books on Archeology, Byzantine history, Ottoman history and Central Asia with 18,000 books and 700 maps. The institute is subscribed to 525 periodicals. The materials can not be borrowed but they can be photocopied.
• Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA) (http://www.ircica.org)is the library of the Islamic Conference Organization. It is located in Yildiz Palace and the collection includes 400,000 books, unpublished doctorate thesis, atlases and maps as well as periodicals.
• Turkish Historical Society (https://www.ttk.gov.tr/ has its own specialized library which contains 250,000 books and a considerable number of periodicals. This makes the library of the Turkish Historical Society Turkey's largest library on history and archeology. The location of the library is in Ankara, but microfilms and photocopies of requested materials can be obtained through IC's Document Supply Service.
• History Foundation of Turkey (http://www.tarihvakfi.org.tr/) The History Foundation of Turkey provides library, archival and bibliographical services through its Information-Documentation Centre (IDC) particularly in the field of history of the economic and social structure of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. It contains over 25,000 books and more than 1,300 periodicals; it is open to researchers every weekday. Its holdings also include 20,000 slides, photographs, maps and posters, 1,200 documentary films and video tapes, 130 audio tapes, 700 audio cassettes, hundreds of iconographic materials and 140 shelf-meters of files of documents.

• Islam Research Center (http://www.isam.org.tr/) functions under the Directorate of Religious Affairs. The library of the Islam Research Center was established in 1984 with the purpose of aiding the group working on the Encyclopedia of Islam. The library contains not only periodicals on Islamic culture, history and civilization, but also publications related to Turkish history, literature and social sciences. In total, the library possesses 182,000 books, 2,720 journals of which 714 are periodicals, as well as 19,144 microfilms of court records, 411 microfiches and microfilms, and 640 CDs. This library also has a thesis databases with 114,000 thesis' bibliographic record in its collection, an article databases with 681,500 bibliographic records from 1923 to 2003, as well as numerous registers of various Ottoman courts of Istanbul. 

Special Interest Groups   
                                                                                        

Women History Network (http://www.womenshistorynetwork.org/ ) was founded in Britain in June 1991 by a group of researchers, teachers and academics. It aims to promote research on women's history. At this webpage you can find announcement for conferences and calls for papers; however it requires individual subscription for access to publications.  

Womens Studies and Research (Institut für Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung) is loacated in Linz, Austria and Germany. The opening page provides links to information on women in Austria and Germany, worldwide information on women, lectures, WWW links, and current issues. The language of the website is German.

http://c19.chadwyck.co.uk/ This special site gives you free access to an online catalog of over 29,000 nineteenth-century works available on microfiche. It allows you to search the largest and most important collection of nineteenth-century works for research and teaching; only the bibliographic record of these works is available online.

P&P Online Catalog - Abdul-Hamid Ii Collection http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/ahiihtml/ahiiabt.html - This collection portrays the Ottoman Empire during the reign of one of its last sultans, Abdul-Hamid II. The 1,819 photographs in 51 large-format albums date from about 1880 to 1893. They highlight the modernization of numerous aspects of the Ottoman Empire, featuring images of educational facilities and students; well-equipped army and navy personnel and facilities; technologically advanced lifesaving and fire fighting brigades; factories; mines; harbors; hospitals; and government buildings. Generally the places illustrated are within the boundaries of modern-day Turkey, but the collection also includes buildings and sites in Iraq, Lebanon, Greece and other countries.

Ancient World Mapping Center is a webpage where you can find maps of the Ancient World; this service is offered by the University of North Carolina.

www.theottomans.org "aims to become the leading information portal regarding the history, military, culture and arts of the Ottoman Empire that has once dominated a large territory from Egypt to Russia, from India to Austria". The website is sponsored but it is not a commercial web site.

Blogs and Email lists

Blogs are sites with comments ordered chronologically in the format of a diary. In them you can find academic discussions of the latest events. At the moment many newspapers in Turkey have blogs. Here is a list of the main Turkish newspapers:

• Radikal Gazetesi
• Hurriyet Gazetesi
• Milliyet Gazetesi
• Turkish Daily News
• Turkish Media Com
• Resmi Gazete

H-Net (http://www.h-net.msu.edu/) is "an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the World Wide Web". Their edited lists and web sites publish peer-reviewed essays, multimedia materials, and discussion for colleagues and the interested public. H-Net officers, editors and subscribers come from all over the globe.

Biography Channel (http://www.biography.com/), here you can find information on biographies of personalities from very different walks of life, while the discussion group can help you share and discuss ideas. 

Books and E-books

You can find printed books on History at the IC catalog, but you also have the option of reading e-books through: Ebrary, NetLibrary, Oxford Reference Online, Gutenberg Project and the Online Library of Liberty. The last two are open sources, that is, you can reach them anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. But the first three require subscription and can be reached through the IC. The e-books you reach through open sources are usually books that have been published in the 19th century and before that date. Through Ebrary, NetLibrary, Oxford Reference Online you can reach contemporary books as well.

Theses

SU  E-Theses

Theses & Dissertations Catalog contains dissertation records from all over the world.

Finding articles 

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) - it is a search engine, that searches other databases based in different countries in the world. It has intellectual criteria for the material and it returns only scientifically relevant web resources.   

Berkeley Electronic Press - it includes journals, subject matter repositories, working paper series, and editorial management software.

European Library- at this site you can find scholarly information on European Union countries.  Through this site you can search several libraries in the EU zone as well; it can be quite helpful if you are doing research on European history.

Findarticles.com - contains articles from the back issues of over 900 magazines, journals, trade publications and newspapers.

Infomine Scholarly Internet Resource Collections- is a comprehensive virtual library and reference tool for academic and scholarly Internet resources, including Web sites and databases.

Oxford E-Prints - this digital library offers materials that can be helpful to history students.

The Institute of Historical Research (IHR) provides resources for historians. These resources include online articles, free event advertising, MA/PhD study, training courses, an open-access library and more.

History in Focus provides original articles, book reviews, and links to historical resources. The site is provided by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

The Medieval Review since 1993, (TMR; formerly the Bryn Mawr Medieval Review) has been publishing reviews of current work in all areas of Medieval Studies, a field it interprets as broadly as possible. The electronic medium allows for very rapid publication of reviews, and provides a computer searchable archive of past reviews, both of which are of great utility to scholars and students around the world.

Journal Databases 

Databases, whose names are given below, cover most of the publications made on the subject of history. The time coverage is excellent, you can find articles published 100 years ago and the abstract of an article that will be published next month. But the best thing is that you don't have to look them up individually because the IC provides you withMetasearch, an engine which checks all these databases at once.  This is the paradise of journal search. 

Project Muse provides "100% full-text, affordable and user-friendly online access to over 300 high quality humanities, arts, and social sciences journals from 60 scholarly publishers". It contains only complete, full-text versions of titles from many of the world's leading university presses and scholarly societies. The only drawback, the full-text articles date after 1995, and this is valid only for some journals. It has a better coverage of articles form 2000s onwards.

Academic Search Complete is one of the databases contained inside Ebscohost.  It contains "indexing for more than 8,100 journals, with full text for nearly 4,500 of those titles. PDF backfiles to 1975 or further are available for well over one hundred journals, and searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 titles". It covers several fields both in social and natural science. Currently it contains 8,144 Abstracted and Indexed Journals; 4,493 Full Text Journals; 6,959 Peer-Reviewed, Abstracted and Indexed Journals; 3,638 Peer-Reviewed, Full Text Journals. But also author supplied abstracts, author supplied keywords, author affiliations, author e-mail addresses, and searchable cited references. 

Cambridge University Press (CUP) Cambridge Journals Online currently has 160,529 articles from 256 leading peer-reviewed academic journals. They cover a wide range of topics and fields. It offers all the advantages of restricted research, full text, abstracts and cross-referencing.

JSTOR Arts & Sciences I Collection includes the complete back runs of 119 titles in fifteen disciplines. It was first established in 1997, and it is JSTOR's first collection and includes many of the core research and society published journals in economics, history, political science, and sociology, as well as in other key fields in the humanities and social sciences.

JSTOR Arts & Sciences II Collection contains 125 titles. This collection increases the number of journals that featured in the disciplines introduced in Arts & Sciences I, such as economics, history, and Asian studies. It also adds core journals in the fields of archaeology, classics, and African, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Slavic studies.

Oxford University Press Journals is a database that provides access to its journals. Its social sciences and humanities collection is wide both in terms of its subjects and in terms of time periods covered. Here you can find publications more than 150 years old.

SAGE Journals Online gives online access to over 460, which are its own publications. To make your research easier and more effective it provides the opportunity of restricting your research and also has cross-referencing options.

SCIRUS (Elsevier) it is a search engine that gives quick access to the latest reports, peer-reviewed articles, patents, pre prints and journals. It has a good coverage, it searches more than 3 million science related pages. 

Web of Science is an integrated Web-based platform, which provides high-quality content and tools to access and analyze information. It is primarily a citation database which offers such facilities as links to full text, citation alerts, table of contents alerts, personal journal lists and personal bibliographic management which make the following of the journals you may be interested in easier.

Wiley InterScience Journals- in this database you can find journal articles, e-books, databases, reference work and current protocols. Wiley InterScience now also includes journal content formerly on Blackwell Synergy, providing access to more than 3 million articles across 1400 journals.

TV and Radio

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/ at this site you can find articles, games, activities and quizzes that help make sense of the past and the sources that made history; a playful way to become more familiar with history.

http://www.open2.net/breakingtheseal/ Breaking the Seal is a series of six half-hour programs investigating documents, and what we can learn from them. Particular relevant to the field of history, since all history courses are concerned with the use and abuse of documents as evidence.

Videos and DVD- Multimedia Collection

Master and commander: the far side of the world / Samuel Goldwyn Films. Call Number: PN1997 .M3743 2004

Napoleon Bonaparte the glory of France /produced by Greystone Communications, Inc. for A & E Networks ; Call Number: DC203 .N37 2002 People's century /executive producer Peter Pagnamenta. London : BBC, 1995-1997.  Call Number: D422 .P46 1995-1997 video  in three volumes

Scipio Africanus The defeat of Hannibal, fascist Italy's 1937 spectatular epic /  Carmine Gallone. Call Number: DG248.S3 S25 2001 video
Turk denizcilik tarihi belgesel. /A documentary of Turkish Maritime History. Call Number: DR451 .T872 VCD

Encyclopedias, handbooks and dictionaries

Here is a list of dictionaries, handbooks and encyclopedias that have useful entries for anyone interested in history. These resources can help you especially if you are at the beginning of your research. They may give you an idea of what the subject is about and in some cases they direct you to further sources for you to explore. 

American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition (from Project Bartleby) it is a dictionary of English language that allows you to check for the definition, etymology of a word.

Bibliomania offers an online library of reference books, biographies, classic non-fiction and religious texts of the main world religions.

Century Dictionary Online "is now the largest freely available online dictionary". It contains more than 10,000 pages, more than 500,000 definitions, 22 million searchable words, and a biographical encyclopedia.

Oxford English Dictionary is an online dictionary of the English language.

Biographical Directory of the United States Congress at this webpage you can find biographies of American Congressmen from 1774 to the present.

Biography.com provides biographical information of public personalities in several fields, including world history.

Columbia Encyclopedia has nearly 51,000 entries and with more than 80,000 hypertext cross-references. "The current Sixth Edition is among the most complete and up-to-date encyclopedias ever produced".

Encyclopedia Britannica is world's most famous encyclopedia in English language. Through its webpage you can reach information in various formats, including maps and videos. It also has direct links, some news sites as well.

Infoplease.com is an encyclopedia that contains general information on a broad range of topics, including history and historical events.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy a comprehensive encyclopedia that gives you access to political, philosophical and historical concepts and personalities' information. 

Wikipedia is a widely used encyclopedia that is created by the users. The information given there can be edited by all the members of the webpage, so pay attention to the signs that tell you whether the facts and data needs further verification.

A Dictionary of ancient history / edited by Graham Speake. Cambridge, Mass., USA : Blackwell, 1994.  Call Number: DE5 .D53 1994 in the reference collection

A dictionary of world history / editors, Alan Isaacs et al. New York : Oxford University Press, 2000. Call Number: D9 .D53 2000 in the reference collection

The Hutchinson dictionary of world history / editors, Jennifer Speake et al. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1993. Call Number:  D9 .H87 1993  in the reference collection

Dictionary of historical terms / Chris Cook. London : Macmillan, 1998. Call Number D9 .C66 1998   in the reference collection

Subject Gateways

Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (http://www.sciper.org/ )is a searchable electronic index to the science content of sixteen nineteenth-century general periodicals. The SciPer Index currently contains entries for around 7,500 articles and references to more than 5,500 individuals and 2,000 publications.

Perseus http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ is a digital library that contains primary and secondary texts of history in Greek, Latin and English. It hosted by Tufts University.

Best of History Web Sites http://www.besthistorysites.net/ is an award-winning portal that contains annotated links to over 1000 history web sites as well as links to hundreds of history teacher guides, history activities, history games, history quizzes, and more.     

World Wide Web Virtual Library of European History is a comprehensive resource with links to authoritative sites on the history of European countries; hosted at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy.

Oxford Text Archive   - Provides high-quality scholarly electronic texts and linguistic corpora (and any related resources) of long-term interest and use across the range of humanities disciplines including history and law.

Bibliographies

Ottoman Research Bibliography (http://www.obib.hacettepe.edu.tr/proje.shtml) in this web page you can find a list of bibliographic books written on Ottoman History.

ViVa (http://www.iisg.nl/~womhist/vivahome.php ) is a current bibliography of women's and gender history in historical and women's studies journals. Articles in English, French, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages are selected from 180 European, American, Canadian, Asian, Australian and New Zealand journals. All bibliographic descriptions are stored in the ViVa database. It now contains more than 10,000 records describing articles from 1975 onwards. It is online and freely accessible. You can search the database, and, for titles from 1995 on it is possible to browse by year of publication.

Bibliography of the History of Western Sexuality 1700-1945
Created and maintained by Franz Eder of the University of Vienna. Contains about 16,000 titles of primary and secondary literature of the history of sexuality in Europe, Canada and the United States.