The Arabic Press Archive of the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel-Aviv University is one of the largest and the most comprehensive collections of modern and contemporary Arabic-language newspapers in the world. It continues to expand, in both digital and hard copy form.
Microfilm
Our archive includes more than one thousand reels of microfilmed newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1877.
Hard Copies
The collection contains more than 6,000 different titles of newspapers, magazines and periodicals from all over the Middle East, including a broad range of Arab states from the Maghreb, the Gulf, as well as Palestinian, Iranian, and Turkish publications, and also publications from outside the region, including the U.S. and Europe.
Most of the collection is stored in seven big halls. We have more than 24,000 boxes containing original hard copies of publications from the 1950s until today, amounting to over 40 million pages.
The collection is unique in a number of respects. It includes not only the established daily press of the Arab world, but also many rare, ephemeral and opposition-movement publications.
Digital Material
1) Our digitization project started in 1997. We currently hold 5,000 discs full of digital newspapers that have been downloaded daily during the last 13 years.
2) In the last six years we have scanned more than one million pages. The scanned newspapers were taken from countries such as Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, especially between the years 1950-1970.