Description

Cengage Learning EMEA® and the National Archives, London are proud to present Arab - Israeli Relations 1917 - 1970, a pioneering Cengage Learning Digital Collection. The first in a series on the political, diplomatic and military history of the Middle East in the 20th century, this collection selects files from the Foreign Office, Colonial Office, War Office and Cabinet Papers classes from among 8 million British government records to tell the macro-level history of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Scanned from Series One of the microfilm collection “The Middle East: A Documentary Resource: Arab - Israeli Relations 1917 - 1970” published by the Cengage Learning imprint Primary Source Microfilm™ this digital archive features a fully searchable database of approximately 17,000 data file records and therefore access to over 137,000 images. It provides researchers with a logical, interdisciplinary research resource, and allows this unique primary source material (predominantly in English, but containing files in 14 languages) to be quickly searched by academics and students, writers and researchers. With full-text search capabilities, researchers can conduct precise searches and comparative research across the collection.

Not only does Arab - Israeli Relations 1917 - 1970 enable researchers to search the documents, but its state-of-the-art search capabilities allow students and scholars to focus their search on full text, specific keywords or phrases, title, subject and more, making research far more convenient and generating comprehensive results faster than any other resource of its kind. From the results list, the user then has the ability to link directly to the full citation for the document, and facsimile images. Arab - Israeli Relations 1917 - 1970 also includes advanced page navigation options, allowing users to navigate within multi-image records such as propaganda books by using a list on the side of the screen to navigate between pages.

About the Arab - Israeli Relations 1917 - 1970 Film Collection
Beginning with the Balfour declaration of 1917, documents are selected to cover all major events through the build-up to the Partition of Palestine, the Border Wars, the Suez Crisis, the Cold War, the Formation of the United Arab Republic and Black September. Files are selected under close guidance from the External Editor – Dr Eugene Rogan of the Middle East Centre at Oxford University.

Major policy statements are set out in their fullest context, the minor documents and marginalia revealing the workings of colonial administration and, following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, British diplomacy towards Israel and the Arab states. The Introduction to the archive by Dr Eugene Rogan, guides users through the collection, and two thematic essays by leading scholars act as research guides to:

• • Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: 1948-70.

• • The PLO and the Palestinian Armed Struggle.

All are accessible via the “Introduction” tab.

Nearly everyone who has researched any aspect of the Middle East: Arab-Israeli Relations has relied on the National Archive – this digital edition will make these resources widely and instantly available to a far larger constituency than ever before.

Back to Top

Data Digitization

A sophisticated process of digitisation and quality control has been developed specifically for the purpose of this product:

• Micro-images are duplicated and pertinent metadata information is prepared. Manual inspection of all metadata fields is performed to ensure the highest quality possible and documents are identified for individual capture during Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning.

• Trained scanner operators select the optimal scanning setting for each document on the microfilm.

• Images are captured as 300dpi greyscale TiF images. These are automatically cropped, de-skewed and converted to PNGs for preservation, then JPGs for online delivery. They are then manually checked for quality.

• Quality control operators view every page image for quality and metadata capture accuracy. Pages identified as poor quality are sent back for rescanning.

• Images are grouped into batches for OCR based on predefined templates to account for different document types.

• Word positional coordinates are captured for both print and manuscript text to allow for hit-term highlighting in the online product.

• Individual page output is transformed into structured XML and additional metadata information is captured based on specifications provided by Cengage Learning.

• Pages that are reviewed and determined not to meet our specifications are returned and reprocessed.

• Given the sheer number of pages of data within this collection, the physical condition of the original documents that were filmed, variant spellings, typing errors in the original documents and the variety of types of text – from Arabic fonts to type-written letters, carbon copies and hand-written items - some OCR errors are inevitable and may occasionally result in incorrect character capture, which may affect some full-text search results. However, the 99.995% accuracy of metadata capture, as well as the incorporation of fuzzy search functionality, greatly minimizes the impact such OCR errors may have on your search results.

Back to Top

Metadata

In addition to the data capture of the full text of all works within this collection, additional details associated with each work have been captured to facilitate searching and ensure accessibility of the works within this database. The majority of this information has been extracted directly from the electronic index to the microfilm collection prepared by Primary Source Microfilm, with additional data from the National Archive’s online library catalogue.

Several search indexes have been developed for Arab - Israeli Relations 1917 - 1970 utilizing this metadata, providing users with unrivalled access to the content and providing full bibliographic details within the Full Citation created for each work. Metadata includes:

• Government Offices – the original organisational divisions within which archival material was collected (ie. Government Departments Offices – such as the Foreign Office, or War Office)

• Heading: subject category, eg. “Colonial Office”

• Title: the individual document description (eg. “Plans for Partition 1937”)

• Date: of publication - please note that some items are undated

• Document Reference: the archival number for each individual item, (eg. CO 1047/760), either allocated by the Library and apparent on the item, or created during the microfilming process and taken from Primary Source Microfilm’s electronic index to the film collection. Users should note that if they wish to use library shelf marks to call printed books at the library, this should be noted from the facsimile image if visible, or ascertained from the National Archive online catalogue accessible via the logo link in the top-right of the screen, as shelf-marks for printed books are not used in the microfilm or online metadata.

Back to Top

Search Paths

The primary purpose of Arab - Israeli Relations 1917 - 1970 is to provide students and researchers with a single place to research and access this vast collection of documentary records. Three search paths have been designed to facilitate this research: