Qajar Iran Digital Archive

Afsaneh Najmabadi (Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University) has launched today a new site on Qajar Women:

http://www.qajarwomen.org/

This site explores the lives of women during the Qajar era (1796-1925) through a wide array of materials from private family holdings and participating institutions. Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran provides bilingual access to thousands of personal papers, manuscripts, photographs, publications, everyday objects, works of art and audio materials, making it a unique online resource for social and cultural histories of the Qajar world.

World Bank - Open Knowledge Repository

World Bank - Open Knowledge Repository

"The World Bank today announced that it will implement a new Open Access policy for its research outputs and knowledge products, effective July 1, 2012. The new policy builds on recent efforts to increase access to information at the World Bank and to make its research as widely available as possible. As the first phase of this policy, the Bank launched today a new Open Knowledge Repository and adopted a set of Creative Commons copyright licenses".

The Open Knowledge Repository is freely available at openknowledge.worldbank.org

Sample reports of interest for Middle East and Islamic studies:
MENA Development Reports
Finance and Financial Sector Development :: Islamic Finance

SemArch : a corpus of Semitic languages recordings

SemArch - Semitisches Tonarchiv

This online archive created by the University of Heidelberg (Germany) contains audio recordings for Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Ethiopian and Neo-South Arabic languages and dialects, divided into:

1960 Audio-documents / 502 Speakers 

20 Countries / 60 Regions / 219 Places

43 Editors and 51 Types of documents.