Half a Million Pages of Middle Eastern History Headed to Digital Form

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Aristotle instructing Alexander the Great Or.2784, folio 96r Miniature depicting Aristotle instructing Alexander the Great, from The Description and Uses of Animals compiled from works by Aristotle and ‘Ubayd Allah ibn Bakhtishu. The undated copy was probably made in Baghdad in the first half of the 13th century. ©British Library Board

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Over 500,000 pages of archive material from the East India Company and India Office, and 25,000 pages of medieval Arabic manuscript, are to be digitised and exhibited online in a project run by the British Library and Qatar Foundation.

The Qatar National Library, Doha, will be working in partnership with the British Library, illustrating the contribution of Islamic scholarship to scientific, medicinal and mathematical knowledge.

The project aims to present as much material as possible in both English and Arabic, mirroring the Qatar National Library’s objective of offering multilingual content once it opens in 2014.

Across the channel from the British Library in London, France’s Louvre in Paris is to open a new gallery dedicated to Islamic art by September 2012.