About us
The specialised information service for Middle Eastern, North African and Islamic Studies has developed a central mission to provide comprehensive support for leading research in Germany in the field of Middle Eastern studies, thereby strengthening Germany's position as a centre of research.
We acquire publications that are difficult to access from the countries and predominantly in the languages of the MENA region and make this highly specialised source material permanently available.
On the one hand, this is traditionally done via the Interlibrary loan service of the ULB Saxony-Anhalt for printed materials and increasingly in digital form as well. Open Access or as a licence offer for the FID specialist community. The MENALIB virtual specialised library provides central access to our holdings, offers and services, which are available to you via the MENAsearch discovery system.
One of our main tasks is to make new media visible in the required philological quality (original script and transcription). This includes enriching the data with high-quality metadata from formal and subject indexing, which regularly involves creating specialised philological standard data.
In this function, the FID also acts as a point of contact for Middle Eastern libraries in the D-A-CH region and as an interface to NFDI consortia in the humanities with regard to cultural data.
Egypt, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Djibouti, Eritrea, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Kyrgyzstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan (Republic of Sudan), Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, United Arab Emirates, Western Sahara
In order to align our service with the needs of research, the FID team maintains close contact with the specialist community, regularly organises roadshows and is in contact with specialist researchers via social media.
If you are travelling from out of town and would like to visit our library and view our holdings, please contact the Information from the ULB and write a Mail to the FID.
The Vorderer Orient branch library is located at Mühlweg 15 in Halle. All necessary information about the location can be found here.
Here find out more about the FID Middle East building.
We ask for your understanding that the specialised information service (FID) will not comment on or comment on current political events.
The FID provides German Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies with research-relevant literature from the MENA region as well as subject-specific services.
The MENALIB, Bluesky and Mastodon websites are used to promote our own services and to communicate with the scientific community and are not used as a platform for the personal opinions of FID team members.