New e-resources for Turkish and Ottoman studies

As the Stanford community continues to navigate the new world of remote teaching and scholarship, the library hopes that two new e-resources will make things a bit easier for students and scholars working on Modern Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.

First, the library now has an e-subscription to the Turkish Daily Newspaper, Cumhuriyet, which is among the oldest and most influential newspapers in the country. Our subscription also gives users access to the paper’s digitized archive, which includes all issues dating back to January 1930. Users can search the database by date or by keyword.

Second, the library also has purchased a subscription to LexiQamus, an online database and dictionary resource for Ottoman Turkish, which was the dominant form of Turkish until 1928. Written in the Arabo-Persian script, Ottoman Turkish was a rich language that borrowed heavily from Arabic and Persian grammar and vocabulary, which makes it a challenge for modern-day researchers. LexiQamus allows researchers to quickly and easily search across a number of Ottoman dictionaries, and its unique algorithm also helps researchers to decipher words that are difficult to read.