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ARIT ISTANBUL REPORT 2007-2008 ANNUAL REPORT July 1, 2007—June 30, 2008 1. HOSTEL A. GUESTS Sixty two scholars stayed at the Institute hostel this past year. Thirteen of these guests were ARIT or Fulbright fellows: five ARIT-CAORC grantees, one ARIT-Aegean fellowship grantee, three ARIT-Mellon grantees, one ARIT-BU grantee, one ARIT-NEH grantee, and two Fulbright- Hayes grantees. Affiliation statistics for the hostel are given below: ARIT member institutions-------------------------------37 Faculty.................................13 Students...............................24 North American non-member institutions-------------12 Faculty..................................10 Students................................2 Institutions outside North America---------------------13 Faculty..................................8 Students................................5 The faculty and staff to graduate student ratio was as follows: University Faculty and staff-----------------------------31 Graduate students-----------------------------------------31 The institutions best represented among the hostel guests were Princeton with 5 guests, followed by NYU with 4 and Duke with 3 guests each. Scholars from outside North America were affiliated with universities in the following countries: Israel (3), Great Britain (3), Bulgaria (2), Germany (1), France (1), Greece (1), Turkey (1), and Northern Cyprus (1). Hostel usage trends have remained fairly steady over the past few years, with a total of 55-70 guests annually, with more use by ARIT institutional members than by other North American universities, and with a roughly equal division between use by graduate students and by faculty and staff. Use by scholars from outside North America averages around one fifth of the total, with the most use by scholars from Great Britain and Israel, followed by Germany and an occasional Balkan country. Hostel evaluation forms were completed by 48 guests. The results, for whatever they may be worth, have been overwhelmingly positive. Out of 48 guests filling out the form for this period, 44 said they found their stay “highly satisfactory”, while 4 found it “satisfactory”. The most frequent complaints were that the internet connection was not reliable enough (3 comments) and that the library tables were too high for comfortable typing (2 comments). It has taken us a while to ascertain the problems with the internet but we now know better how to deal with them. Occasionally the ASDL line itself is down, but more often the problem stems from our modems, which seem to work well for only a few months and then start to become erratic. We have changed modems three times in the last two years, and if necessary will be changing them even more frequently in the future. We also plan to change the library tables in the Ottoman library in the near future. 1 ARIT ISTANBUL REPORT 2007-2008 B. INCOME Hostel income this year came to $24,914. This is the third highest income on record, but down from the last two years, as was total nights occupancy. This decrease can be attributed almost entirely to a sudden turndown we had last winter, where for the three months of January to March we had only a 20% occupancy rate, as opposed to a 90% and 75% occupancy rates for the same period the two previous years. The other nine months of the year occupancy rates were the same as they had been in previous years. I am at a loss to explain this sudden dip. As rates have reverted to the norm since them, and appear to be as high as ever this current year, I can only asume this was a matter of chance.. The following table shows trends in hostel occupancy and income over the past six years: 2001-2 2002-3 2003- 4 2004-5 2005-6 2006-7 2007-2008 Total Guests 54 49 53 78 71 64 62 Total room n.a.. n.a. 1577 1372 1986 1835 1443 Occupancies Total Income $17,739 $20,043 $23,749 $22,936 $31,719 $28,773 $24,914 A list of guests staying at the hostel over the past year is included in the appendices. 2. LIBRARY A. USAGE The library had 685 walk-in users over the last year, just a little lower than the year before, with highest usage by students from Boğaziçi University, followed by Koç University, Istanbul Technical University, and Istanbul University in that order. This is an average of a little under three visits per day the library was open. As has always been the case, a majority of outside library use was by Turkish scholars, with about 27% by visiting foreign scholars: TOTAL Turkey affiliation visits-------------------------------------------509 Turkish university faculty and staff:-------------------------32 Turkish university students (mostly graduate)-------------493 Independent researchers, journalists, etc--------------------11 TOTAL non-Turkey affiliation visits-------------------------------------176 Faculty and staff------------------------------------------------23 Students (almost entirely graduate)--------------------------144 Independent researchers, journalists, etc--------------------9 The largest single category of user is graduate students from Turkish universities, and over a third of these are from Boğaziçi University, which is nearby, and who come for both the Ottoman and the Byzantine collection, whereas it is the Byzantine Collection in particular that draws students from the other major universities and indeed from around the country. These figures are only for outside usage; they do not include use by the scholars residing at the Institute, our most important clientele. 2 ARIT ISTANBUL REPORT 2007-2008 B. COLLECTION Over the year a total of 162 monograph titles and 17 offprints were added to the collection; of the monographs 101 came as gifts and the remaining 61 were purchased. The total number of monograph titles in our library database has now reached close to 9,200 and the total number of volumes on the shelves is well over 13,000. The total number of journal titles is 264, of which 41 are currently being kept up. The rest have either ceased publishing or are partial runs that we do not keep up. The pamphlet collection consists of 2,170 items, evenly distributed beween Ottoman and Byzantine subjects, with a much smaller number on contemporary Turkey. C. LIBRARIAN Our new Librarian, Buket Kitapcı-Bayrı, began work in January 2008. This is the first time that I am aware of that ARIT Istanbul has ever hired someone to work specifically in the library. Buket is a Byzantine historian, currently finishing a joint PhD between the Sorbonne and Boğaziçi University on Byzantine and Muslim hagiographical sources for late medieval Anatolian history. With a knowledge of medieval Greek and Ottoman, as well of course of Turkish, French and English, she is uniquely qualified to deal with the particular emphases of the ARIT collection. Her regular tasks will include making purchase decisions, offering reference help for users (something we’ve never been able to do), and better physical maintenance of the collection (binding and repair). Also among her more important tasks has been the identification of elements of the Snipes library that need to be kept up, and new resources and databases that need to be subscribed to as part of our NEH Challenge grant for library enhancement. In the meantime, however, she is finding that the most trying and physically tiring part of her work is shifting tens of meters of books around on the shelves to try to take advantage of the few remaining inches of space left in various corners and on top of shelves. We have already moved 18 m. of lesser used books and journals down into the basement room, and soon will have to move more. Thank goodness for JSTOR, which makes it much easier for us to shift old journals into storage. Generous donations of books keep our library going, and have made it the invaluable resource it is. For this ARIT and all its users are tremendously grateful. The most important donor over the past year was Peter Kuniholm, who allowed us to select books from his own collection, prodded friends and acquaintances to give us others, and arranged for a donation from the Corning Glass Museum of important publications, including a near complete run of The Journal of Glass Studies, both to us and to the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. I wish to express a very warm thanks to all the individuals and institutions who have donated to the library over the past year, and to encourage the ARIT Board and delegates to continue in their good efforts to solicit donations for our collection. A list of this year’s library donors is attached to this report. 3. LECTURES The Institute hosted a total of ten lectures over the course of the year. The lecture season ran from early October to mid-December in the fall, and from late January to early June in the spring. All lectures were held on Monday nights at either 6:30 p.m. or 7:00 p.m. in the H. Kenneth Snipes Byzantine Studies Collection room, followed by receptions held one floor below in the main library room. Notifications of all lectures were sent to the other foreign institutes, to the Friends, to Dernek members, and to a mailing list of around 250 persons, 3 ARIT ISTANBUL REPORT 2007-2008 mostly academics, in the Istanbul area. Attendance at lectures varied from a low of 20 to a high of about 45 persons. Fall Lectures Dr. Henry Mathews, Professor Emeritus, Washington State University “Ottoman Mosques: Their Place in Global Architectural History” Prof. Markus Dressler, Dept. of Religion, Hofstra University “Secularist Discourse, Islam, and the Question of Alevi Recognition” Prof. Suraiya Faroqhi, History Department, Bilgi University “Ottoman Craftsmen Inside and Outside of the Guilds” Prof. Aslı Niyazioğlu, History Department, Koç University “Dreams, Biography Writing, and the Halveti-Sünbüli Sheikhs in Late Sixteenth Century İstanbul” Prof. Evangelos Kechriotis, History Department, Boğaziçi University “Educating the Nation: Migration and Acculturation on the Two Shores of the Aegean at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” Spring Lectures Prof.

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