Ladies and Gentlemen, drumroll please – we have fantastic news about updates from two of the most important resources in Jewish Studies:

1) RAMBI, the Index to Articles in Jewish Studies, profiled here, sent the below email yesterday:

"Subject searching in RAMBI, The Index to Articles in Jewish Studies, is being changed so that searching a subject either in English or in Hebrew will retrieve both Hebrew and European language articles.

 

This change is being gradually introduced and we hope will be completed by the summer. Until then, if a search retrieves articles only in the script of the search term we recommend searching also under the alternate script term."

This is a major change which should halve searching time, as previously one had to search separately in Roman characters and in Hebrew for subjects in both character sets.

2) The Bar Ilan Responsa Project has now added features to support Aramaic and acronym (ראשי תיבות) searchability:

• Dictionary for both acronyms and Hebrew-Aramaic/Aramaic-Hebrew
• Ability to search acronyms and Aramaic in the database
• "Fast reference": While browsing a text, you can now highlight an Aramaic word or an acronym, and a pop-up will provide a Hebrew explanation/translation