“Bibliography”, as a concept and as an instrument to control the products of intellectual and artistic activities, has had a long history of evolution in Turkey as in other countries of the world. Kâtib Çelebi (1609-1657), a seventeenth century Turkish scholar, who is known as Haji Khalifah by Westerners, produced his famous work “Keşfu’z-Zunûn ‘an Esmái’1-Kütübi ve’1-Fünûn” in the middle of that century, and this was first published by Gustav Fluegel in seven volumes between the years of 1835–1858, in Arabic and Latin with the title of Lexicon Bibliographicum et Encyclopaedicum. This work marks one of the summits of bibliographical evolution in Turkey. More than three hundred years have passed since the appearance of this monumental work which is universally considered as an important contribution to human knowledge. So far the Turkish intellectuals have not been able to produce another work of this calibre, however they have always been aware of the importance of bibliographical activities for a changing society. I will soon try to draw a picture of the scene of the bibliographical activities in today’s Turkey by giving some concrete examples.

The past few years have seen the rise in the use of computers and quantitative techniques for the study of the Middle East. My recent article “Quantitative Research on the Middle East in Islamic Times,” American Research Center in Egypt Newsletter, 93 (Spring, 1975), 4–15 established this fact statistically, and a follow-up article in the Bulletin, “New Trends in the Use of the Computer for the Study of the Middle East,” Volume IX, Number 3 (October 1, 1975), pp. 16–26, reported several ongoing projects relating to the use of computers, both with and without the simultaneous use of quantitative techniques. This article is an update of the latter article.