elsewhereonline.com.au

These images, mainly from the seventeenth eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are drawn from plates in the rare books collection of both universities. Until now, these pictures have been hard to find. We have digitised them so that they can be used for teaching and simple viewing and we will make them available to scholars, publishers and others for use in their work. The work of identifying digitising and cataloguing the pictures is a slow one, but by late 2006 we expect to have well over 600 images on this site.

The images are organised according to the original books, and they remain the property of the originating university. By bringing them together in one site we are providing a critical mass of images, and we hope that other libraries will be able to join us.

The University of Melbourne Special Collections hold around 200,000 volumes of books, journals and pamphlets, which have been placed on 'closed access' by reason of their age, value or uniqueness. This has been done in order to ensure they will be preserved for future generations of scholars and researchers.  Al-Akhawayn University in Ifrane’s collection of material on Morocco, while it is much smaller, is also one of the best collections anywhere on early modern
Morocco. We hope that by making them available in digital form we will provide a service to the world community.