Help With Your Research
How to use the Open Jerusalem Catalog
The Open Jerusalem Catalog is a tool conceived to explore a selection of archival and bibliographic records on Jerusalem’s late Ottoman and Mandate history, as described by the Open Jerusalem team.
Each item has a reference consisting of a prefix indicating the country where it is physically located, followed by the acronym of the archive it belongs to, then a number indicating its exact place within that collection.
The reference will link to a title and description, details of the creator and date created (if known).
The following terms can be entered into the search field:
- Keywords (e.g. “Jaffa”)
- Keywords with "*" (e.g. "Khalid*", "Khal*di", "*alid*")
- Phrases (e.g. “Damascus Gate”)
- Boolean phrases (e.g. "Jerusalem AND Hebron", "Jerusalem OR Hebron", "Jerusalem NOT Hebron")
If you want access to all the data with a complete range of search options and tools, after your basic search you can filter your results. The Open Jerusalem catalog allows the user to filter the results of such searches using the facets on the left-hand sidebar.
Facets include “Item Type", "Date", “Archival Record Type,” “Repository,” “Creator,” “Language of Material,” “Publisher” and “Digital Object.”
You can also enter the number of items per page you wish to be displayed.
To view the full information and links for a particular catalog record, click on the title. Its place in the hierarchy of related records is shown below the catalog details.
The record for an individual archival item usually states the “identity area” of the item (reference, title, dates, level of description, extent and medium), the “content area” (repository and name of creator), the “content and structure area,” with the description of the content of the item, the “catalog references area,” with the link to the inventory collection on the Access to Memory (AtoM) database.
You can also browse the inventory by hierarchy: the selected item will appear in orange.
Moreover, every archival item is correlated with the “is part of” section, presenting the main information of the collection the item is located in, including a section called “archival history” that provides details on the fonds, the existing finding aids, the conditions governing access, the bibliography on the fonds and other data about the description work carried out by the Open Jerusalem project.
On the right sidebar there are also tools to send comments to the team, share the item, export it in PDF and XML format, add it to your cart (when logged in).
Where the digitized copy of the record is available, the item is accompanied by a “digital objects” section, which provides information on where to read and download the document.
The Open Jerusalem team is available to assist you in every phase of the search. Please contact us if you cannot find what you are looking for or if you wish to comment on the database. We will do our best to make your research more effective.