Israel’s national library sees Arabic site traffic boom

By ILAN BEN ZION
Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP) — The National Library of Israel says the number of visitors to its Arabic website more than doubled over the course of 2021, thanks to the digitization of its Arabic manuscripts and archives and an extensive outreach program in recent years. The library says about 650,000 users visited the site in 2021, driven by a surge in traffic from within Israel and growing visits from across the Arabic-speaking world. One the most heavily trafficked resources on the site is an Arabic newspaper archive with more than 200,000 pages of publications from Ottoman and British Mandate Palestine.