The Encyclopaedia of Islam is a great work of reference covering the many-sided nature of Islam and the Muslim world, with articles on art, history, law, philosophy, politics, religion, and more. The user can browse the alphabetical entries, or peruse and select from the Subjects index or the Names index. Searching options include using English or transliterated terms to query Full Text, Headwords (article entries), Keywords, bibliographies, or Contributors.

• Interested in the famous library at Cordoba created by the Umayyad caliphs that “contained some 4000,000 volumes, described in a catalogue of 44 volumes, each containing 40 leaves”? What was its fate? Check out the article entitled MAKTABA (Arabic for “library”).
• What about the spread of Islam in China, where the “military forces [of Kubilay Khan], used for the overunning of both North and South China, were built largely upon the thousands of Muslim soldiers which he brought with him from the Middle Eastern and Central Asian campaigns.” Look at the article on CHINA (al-SIN).
• Want to find books and articles on modern Turkey? Search the Bibliography field for “modern turkey” and you’ll retrieve the bibliographies of 81 articles. If you’re just interested in the early state period, you could add the term “world war” and reduce the set to 5. (You can even search the bibliographies for “temple university” and find that two Temple dissertations have been cited.)
• And what about a comprehensive article on the Koran (al-KURAN), with sections on Etymology and Synonyms, Muhammad and the Kuran, History of the Kuran After 632, Structure, Chronology of the Text, Language and Style, Literary Forms and Major Themes, The Kuran in Muslim Life and Thought, and Translation of the Kuran?

The Encyclopaedia of Islam covers the main precepts of Islam at the same time that it reveals the rich interplay between Islam and other world civilizations going all the way back to the late antique world. This encyclopedia will prove very useful, whether you’re studying the core of Islam or just nibbling at the interdisciplinary edges. There are some challenges, however, that the user needs to deal with. For one, you will need to download Brill fonts for handling Arabic terms in transliteration. You can find links to the fonts in the upper right corner of the main search page. For serious scholars and students of Islam the many Arabic terms are one of the encyclopedia’s great advantages. For the uninitiated, however, it does take some getting used to (but after a little while it becomes fun). Don’t wait. Check out the Encyclopaedia of Isalm today! BTW, more good news: the second edition of The Encyclopedia Judaica will be released in the fall in print and online (as part of the Gale Virtual Reference Library). I hope we can get both versions. This will fill a big gap as we do not currently have a major online Jewish/Judaism encyclopedia. –Fred Rowland

Temple now has access to the premier database for medievalists, The International Medieval Bibliography Online (IMB), which contains over 300,000 articles in thirty different languages. The articles come from journals, conference proceedings, essay collections, and festschriften chosen by a “worldwide network of fifty teams to ensure regular coverage of 4,500 periodicals and a total of over 5,000 miscellany volumes”. Extensive indexing–including separate indexes for subjects, people, places, repositories, and time periods–allows for precise searching. The IMB covers the period from 300 to 1500 CE and the geographic regions of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, making it relevant to scholars of classics, religion, philosophy, art and archaeology, history, literature, and Islamic studies. In addition to the IMB, here are some other electronic resources relevant to the study of various aspects of the Middle Ages: Encyclopedias:

• Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages;
• Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium;
• Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance;
• Encyclopedia of Philosophy;
• Encyclopedia of Religion;
• New Catholic Encyclopedia;
• New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Databases:

• ITER: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance;
• Index Islamicus;
• ATLA–the database of the American Theological Library Association;
• Bibliography of the History of Art;
• Philosopher’s Index;
• MLA International Bibliography–the database of the Modern Language Association.

–Fred Rowland

Paley Library has purchased the combined LexisNexis Congressional and United States Serial Set research databases. LexisNexis Congressional is the most comprehensive electronic index currently available for United States legislative information. Congressional publications comprise an extremely wide variety of information that reflects the needs and concerns of an evolving nation. They impact virtually every aspect of the curriculum and are particularly important for the Departments or Schools of Business Administration, History, Economics, Law, Political Science, Social Administration, Communications, Criminal Justice, Sociology, Education, Geography and Urban Studies, Journalism, American Studies and, African American studies. The LexisNexis Congressional interface allows users to simultaneously search the Congressional reports and documents that comprise the Serial Set as well as prints, bills, the Congressional Record, selected testimony in hearings before Congress, Public Laws, Statutes at Large, the United States Code Service, the Federal Register, and the National Journal. It also provides information about Congressional Committees, Congressional biographies, recent legislative activities, and public policy issues such as voting records, financial data, and regulatory information. Much of the material is linked to full text. Congressional publications from as early as1789 are available in their entirety as are the text and status of proposed current legislation and recently signed laws. Additional resources offered by LexisNexis Congressional includes a keyword searchable Code of Federal Regulations, and the full text of the Washington Post’s Section A from 1977 to the present. LexisNexis Congressional’s legislative publications online and Paley Library’s collection of legislative publications combine to provide the Paley Library community with a complete set of the official congressional publications. The link to this resource is now available via the library electronic resources web pages. Here’s the A-Z database list. We hope you will find this resource useful. If you have any questions about its content or if you have any difficulty using it, please contact me or one of my colleagues in Reference and Instructional Services at Paley library. —Susan J. Golding