A native of Baghdad, Abd-Allatif (1162 1231) was a versatile scholar and scientist of vast erudition. This prolific author travelled widely throughout the Muslim world and wrote an account of Egypt at a time when the country was rarely visited by Europeans. The book covers matters ranging from natural history and medicine to culture and domestic economy. It also includes a vivid description of the terrible famine that Abd-Allatif witnessed in 1200 and 1201 when the Nile failed to flood. The text was widely known in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century thanks to Latin and German translations. Orientalist Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758 1838) translated and edited this version, first published in French in 1810. Complementing this invaluable account are excerpts from several other Arab writers, a detailed biography of Abd-Allatif, and a general overview of the provinces and villages of Egypt in the fourteenth century.

Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758 1838), the most distinguished French orientalist of his time, is considered the father of Arab scholarship in Europe. He had a lifelong interest in a little-known religious community, the Druze, which emerged in the eleventh century as an Ismaili schismatic movement. De Sacy's monumental study was begun in the 1790s, when he translated some of the Druze scriptures from Arabic to French. Such was his commitment to learning more about the Druze that he waited forty years before publishing this two-volume work in 1838, as he hoped to uncover further source material. It offers pioneering insight into the religious system founded by Hamza ibn-'Ali ibn-Ahmad during the reign of the caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. Volume 1 looks at the early history and doctrines of the Ismaili movement before expanding on the reign of al-Hakim (996 1021).

Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758 1838), the most distinguished French orientalist of his time, is considered the father of Arab scholarship in Europe. He had a lifelong interest in a little-known religious community, the Druze, which emerged in the eleventh century as an Ismaili schismatic movement. De Sacy's monumental study was begun in the 1790s, when he translated some of the Druze scriptures from Arabic to French. Such was his commitment to learning more about the Druze that he waited forty years before publishing this two-volume work in 1838, as he hoped to uncover further source material. It offers pioneering insight into the religious system founded by Hamza ibn-'Ali ibn-Ahmad during the reign of the caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. Volume 2 thoroughly examines the Druze hierarchical structures and doctrines, from moral duties to civil law.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2019, held in Olslo, Norway, in September 2019. The 16 revised full papers,12 short papers and 18 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. The general theme of TPDL 2019 was Connecting with Communities and so the papers attempt to facilitate establishing connections and convergences between diverse research communities such as Digital Humanities, Information Sciences and others that could benefit from ecosystems offered by digital libraries and repositories. To become especially useful to the diverse research and practitioner communities digital libraries need to consider special needs and requirements for effective data utilization, management and exploitation.