Welcome to the website for the Heritage Gazetteer of Libya, and the Online Archives of the British Institute for Libyan and North African Studies (formerly the Society for Libyan Studies), which are being developed by members of the Institute working with King's Digital Laboratory.
The aim of the Gazetteer is to record, and to provide with Unique Identifiers, locations and monuments within modern Libya which are of significance to the history of the area up to 1950; we are offering as many variant names as possible, together with geodata from various sources. The resultant identifiers (URI) can be read by a computer, and used by anyone recording heritage materials online. We hope to encourage contributions from Libya and elsewhere.
The Archives of the Institute are an important resource; the physical archives are housed at the University of Leicester by the School of Archaeology and Ancient History. These materials have now been catalogued; the contents of that Catalogue form the basis for the Online Archive. Entries in the Archive also have Unique Identifiers, and we are gradually linking them to locations in the Gazetteer. We intend to enhance this resource by the addition of digital records of materials in the Archive, and elsewhere.
In 2022-2023 we worked with the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara to develop a protocol for recording and listing People in the Archive; this work was funded by the Imagining Futures project. The structures have now been developed, and we are working to populate them; the resultant data offer a further entry point into the Archives, and will also illustrate many connections between the British International Research Institutes (BIRI).
It is our hope that these resources will be useful for everyone interested in studying, or recording, the history of Libya.