Ongoing Projects

The FID Middle Eastern, North African and Islamic Studies is both regionally and subject-oriented. Regionally, it ensures the extensive supply of humanities, social, political, literary, and linguistic studies with research-relevant literature on Arabic-speaking North Africa and the Middle East, on Turkey and Iran, as well as on the Caucasus and Central Asia. It mostly attends to more traditional oriental subjects such as Arabic Studies, Iranian Studies, Turkish Studies, Armenian Studies and Caucasian Studies. In terms of subjects, it focuses primarily on the interest fields of Islamic Studies, Islamic Theology, and research on the Christian Orient.

Concerning acquisition and licensing, the FID focuses on providing hardly accessible literature written in the original languages of the MENA region. In addition to acquiring print media, the FID also negotiates licenses for databases containing original language materials from the MENA region, which are otherwise not freely accessible in Germany. Within this framework, it strives for the broadest possible access, such as national licenses. Thus, the open access repository MENAdoc offers researchers in Germany, but increasingly also from the MENA region, the opportunity to publish in Green but also Diamond Open Access. The FID further assumes the role of rights clearance and, if possible, the digitisation of publications previously only available in print as well as their following OA publication on MENAdoc.

In order to use the media provided, the FID is currently striving to implement Lukida in the present funding phase, a discovery system whose search space meets the philological and technical requirements of research in authentic script. The FID further supports projects in the area of research data management, especially regarding the fields of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, works out proposals for the standardisation of metadata and workflows in the field of Oriental Studies, and supplies the results and resulting requirements into the NFDI process. Moreover, in cooperation with a expert association, a more traditional subject-specific bibliography (Turkologischer Anzeiger) shall be continued as an online bibliography, for which purpose a special workflow needs to be created. Besides that, the FID Middle East, together with other FIDs of the Asia network, is involved in the improvement of the full text recognition (OCR) software for non-Latin scripts of Asia.

For systemising the exchange with the professional community and the various regional and professional FIDs, the FID Middle Eastern, North African and Islamic Studies regularly presents its services to a broad professional public by means of roadshows, newsletters, tweets, and online tutorials.