Muteferriqa is a discovery portal for printed Ottoman Turkish documents. Published by Miletos, Muteferriqa is intended to provide a simplified entry point to researching historical documents from the last Ottoman century and the beginnings of the Republic, and to open up new avenues in Ottoman studies, and also Middle East studies.
About Muteferriqa
From the provider’s website:
Muteferriqa combines the historical content with the advantages of a modern search engine, which can facilitate and also shorten your research search. It lets you perform full-text search within seconds across millions of pages of its corpus, which consists of virtually all the books and a large majority of periodicals ever printed in Ottoman Turkish. Refining queries through rich and extensive metadata gives relevant cross-sections of the material.
Our Specialised Information Service has arranged a test period for our circle of users until 30 April 2023. In case of positive feedback, we would consider a permanent license.
This link will redirect you to the provider’s platform.
Search Features
Muteferriqa offers you for your research:
- Full-text search in millions of pages of Ottoman Turkish printed books and periodicals
- Advanced search, to combine metadata queries and full-text queries with logical operators
- Wildcard search, where special symbols stand for any character, e.g. to find words with suffixes
- Fuzzy search, where some characters are allowed not to match, e.g. to find spelling variations for foreign names
- Proximity search, to find multiple words within a given distance from each other, potentially within the same sentence or paragraph
Discovery Features
- Discover similar visuals with recommendations based on visual content
- Discover similar titles with content based recommendations
- Discover query terms that potentially lead you to what you are looking for with automatic query suggestions
User Experience
- Keep track of your research with bookmarks and saved searches
- Navigate through the titles with ease using Muteferriqa’s comprehensive index pages
- Use the tailored virtual keyboard to enter your Arabic script queries and to make use of the advanced functionality like proximity search
- Faceted search, to filter search results by metadata
Modes of Access
Access is available to members of the institutions of our circle of users until the 31 March 2023. Authentication is based on the IP numbers of the respective network.
A VPN or other remote connection is required when working in the home office. If access via remote connection is not possible you can log in as a single user.