Library & Archive
We have designed our space in Berlin-Wilmersdorf so that we can have our office and a multi-purpose room there, as well as our library and archive. We are happy that this is possible.
Unfortunately, we haven't made any progress with our planned online catalog yet. Excel spreadsheets should have the necessary initial formatting, but we still need to figure out the details. We are currently looking for a feasible solution for this, now that a suitable location for the various components and containers of the library and archive has been identified.
Archive at the top of two white wall shelves
The archive materials are stored in numbered boxes of various sizes, which we keep at the top of two wall shelves (see Figure 1 in the gallery at the bottom).
The contents of the boxes are described partly in an Excel spreadsheet and partly in Word documents. These include, for example, photocopies of published books or parts thereof, or manuscripts in various languages that were sent to our namesake at some point and were part of his estate. Some boxes, however, contain only newspaper clippings from various years and in various languages, with the source neatly noted but completely disorganized.
Library in the middle room on wooden shelves
Our books (monographs) are housed in the middle room, organized by language and arranged in two rows. The books are located on a wall of shelves and another shelf (see Figures 2 and 3 in the gallery). They have also been recorded in an Excel spreadsheet, organized by language.
Our namesake's published books are listed in a separate Excel spreadsheet. They are also kept separately, in the bookcase in the multi-purpose room of our building (see Figure 4).
In addition to the books, we took from Jemal Nebez's apartment/office, our library also contains a collection of periodicals, including many in Kurdish (in both scripts), some published in Kurdistan and some in the diaspora. We have catalogued a large portion of these periodicals in an Excel spreadsheet and placed them in numbered standing boxes housed on two shelves with compartments. The shelves are usually arranged with closed compartments in our multifunctional room (see figure 5).
Another category of periodicals, a type of newsletter that was still common in print in the 1990s, has its place on another shelf in the middle room (see figure 6). The contents of these standing folders are also recorded in an Excel spreadsheet. Jemal Nebez had been receiving the monthly reports from the Institut Kurde de Paris for years. These can now also be viewed online. Until further notice, however, these and others of their kind can remain in their current location.
The actual estate is still missing from the archive
The inventory of our namesake's academic and journalistic estate is now largely complete (see Figure 7). We intend to publish parts of it as soon as possible, i.e., digitize them and make them publicly accessible online. The original documents will then be housed in our premises on Spichernstrasse. There is suitable space for this in several locations within our premises on Spichernstrasse.
It has become clear that establishing an institution specializing in the preservation and dissemination of our namesake's ideas and works is very labor-intensive and time-consuming.
Under the current circumstances, we have been able to make some progress. We are now concentrating on digitizing his actual estate, at least part of it, and on the further dissemination of his published works, which have long been out of print in book form. Information about this work can be found on our subpage Long-Term Project/Estate.
1 - Archive boxes in the upper section of two end-wall shelves in our premises.
2 - Books in the wooden wall shelf of our library in the middle room of our premises.
3 - Another shelf of our library, arranged in two rows, all sorted by language.
4 - Stored in the bookcase in the multi-purpose room, special department Jemal Nebez.
5 - Periodicals are stored in standing boxes in compartments in the multi-purpose room.
6 - Another wooden shelf for periodicals in the middle room.
7 - The scientific and journalistic estate, packed in new boxes after inventory.
