Arabic, Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies Subject Guide — Online Manuscript Collections

The Biblioteca Digital AECID from Spain offers a wide variety of digitized manuscripts located in Spanish archives and libraries. Worth checking is their Arabic collection of manuscripts.

An image database of Persian historical documents from Iran and Central Asia up to the 20th century

Arabic Collections Online (ACO) is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content. ACO currently provides digital access to 6773 volumes across 4361 subjects drawn from rich Arabic collections of distinguished research libraries. Supported by New York University in Abu Dhabi, this mass digitization project aims to feature up to 23,000 volumes from the library collections of NYU and partner institutions. Check the "Other Resources" page to links to other collections and resources"

Harvard’s Islamic Heritage Project (IHP) is a freely available digital collection that includes over 280 manuscripts, more than 50 maps, and more than 275 printed texts from Harvard’s renowned library and museum collections.

The Arabic manuscripts collection of the Wellcome Library (London) comprises around 1000 manuscript books and fragments relating to the history of medicine. For the first time this website enables a substantial proportion of this collection to be consulted online via high-quality digital images of entire manuscripts and associated rich metadata.

The Princeton University Library has some 9,500 Islamic manuscripts, chiefly bound paper codices, containing a total of more than 20,000 texts.

Search this database to find Arabic manuscripts digitized by the British Library.

Search this database to find the Bodleian's digitized Arabic and many other collections

From the National Library of France, you can browse this site to see the Islamic and related religions collections and manuscripts that have been digitized. Navigation is in French.

This growing archive covers modern history and culture of the Gulf and wider region, available online for the first time.

"This collection is the corpus of manuscripts mainly focused on Arabic, collected by Dr. Hans Daiber, a professor of Islamic studies in Germany, over many years. Institute of Oriental Culture, University of Tokyo purchased the collection, its first part in 1986-1987 and its second part in 1994."

The Quranic Arabic Corpus, an annotated linguistic resource which shows the Arabic grammar, syntax and morphology for each word in the Holy Quran. The corpus provides three levels of analysis: morphological annotation, a syntactic treebank and a semantic ontology.

DigiVatLib is a digital library service. It provides free access to the Vatican Library’s digitized collections of manuscripts and incunabula. You can search this database for Arabic and related collections.

Website of the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry's digitized manuscript collection.

If the book is out of copyright, or the publisher has given Google permission, you'll be able to see a preview of the book and in some cases the entire text. If it's in the public domain, you're free to download a PDF copy.