There are many possibilities to catalogue the knowledge of the world and, in particular, many libraries and other knowledge repositories have developed their own index systems geared mainly around books and other printed material.

Two of the best known indexing systems are the Dewey Decimal Classification and the Library of Congress Classification. However, after over 10 years work in the area of contemporary Arab-West, Muslim-West and Muslim-Christian relations - working with our own archive of over 20,000 texts, articles and reports - we have found that neither of these systems lend themselves specifically to our work.

As a result we have been developing our own indexing system (AWR-index) and the current version, which is still being developed, can be seen here. This index has been developed as part of the ENAWU project (sponsored by the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation and the German development organisation Misereor). Our intention is to develop this further as one of the components of the second phase of ENAWU, with the objective of the index including the categorization needed by other organizations who are dealing with Arab-West, Muslim-West and Muslim-Christian issues.

Here is an overview of all top-categories linked to AWR.

Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts)