The
Gateway
To
Gazettes (G2G) project proposes to take two unusually valuable
resources, the gazettes of independent Syria and British Mandate Palestine for the period 1919-
48, and make them widely available to scholars. Official gazettes are the documents of record in
which governments publish their laws and regulations, comprising bills, acts, regulations,
decrees, and the like. For emerging nations, these documents are unusually rich sources for
economic, legal, political, social, and cultural history; but precisely for such nations, access to
these documents may be challenging. The gazettes have been difficult to locate and use, can be
printed on bad paper, and are erratically collected. For a contested and important slice of modern
Middle Eastern (ME) history, this project has every prospect of supporting major scholarly
advance and a better-informed public debate.
Yale University Library, working closely with the Yale Law School, aims to bring
together two key collections of Middle Eastern official gazettes held by Yale Library; the Syrian
gazette in printed format (one of the unique copies extant in the United States) and the Palestine
Gazette on 40 microfilm reels plus 5 supplementary print volumes. The project will create a
digital representation of the publications and thus establish a basis for ongoing collaborative
collections of digitized ME official gazettes.
