ARIT Istanbul (ARIT-I) Digital Library and American Board Archives

Public Access to Local Resources, Worldwide

ARIT ‘s library and archive collections in Istanbul contain a number of unique primary historical sources that are either unavailable or hard to find both locally and internationally, and ARIT aims to make these materials readily available to scholars via the worldwide web. The digital collection primarily includes archival records and published material related to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), one of the most active US-based international missionary organizations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as several contemporary scholarly journals that are difficult to obtain outside of Turkey.

The effort to makes these important items accessibly on the Internet, which blends current technology with ARIT’s objective of advancing research about Turkey and its past, is being implemented jointly by the ARIT Istanbul Center, the Digital Library for International Research (DLIR), and the SALT Research Center and Library in Istanbul. Funding has been provided by grants from the US Department of Education’s Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) program (2011), the United States Department of State (2012-3), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2013).