Reading a work
Inside a work — its details, the Directory and Pages views, browsing by volume, and reading the original scanned pages with text.
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A work is one complete biographical book in the library. Its page is where you read about the book, move through it volume by volume, search its narrators, and read the original printed pages. This page walks through everything a work page offers.
Open a work from the library home page.
The work’s details
At the top of a work page is a header with the book’s essentials:
- The title in Arabic, with its transliteration (and an English rendering where there is one).
- The author, with their year of death in the Hijri calendar.
- The editor (muḥaqqiq) — the scholar who prepared this printed edition — where recorded.
- The publisher and the year of the edition, where recorded.
- A row of counts: how many entries (narrator biographies), volumes, and pages the work has.
This frames what you’re about to read: which edition it is, who stands behind it, and how large it is.
Two ways to read: Directory and Pages
Just below the header is a toggle with two modes. Switch between them at any time:
| Mode | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Directory | The narrators — search the book by name or number, and browse its volumes. This is the default. |
| Pages | The original book, read page by page as scanned images with their text. |
Directory is the way in when you’re looking for a person; Pages is the way in when you want to read the book itself, cover to cover.
The Directory view
The Directory view is built around two things:
- A search box for finding a narrator by name or entry number. How it behaves — Arabic search, ignoring diacritics, partial matches, and the result count — is covered in Finding narrators.
- The work’s volumes, shown as cards when the search box is empty. Each card carries the volume’s Arabic title, its subject, and how many entries it holds.
Inside a volume
Open a volume to see its narrators in order. Each row shows the entry’s number, the narrator’s name, and the page it begins on. Section headings group the list (for example, by city or generation) — these are headings, not people. A Read scanned pages link at the top of the volume opens that volume in the page reader. Select any narrator to open their entry.
The Pages view
The Pages view lists the work’s volumes for page-by-page reading, each with a preview of its first page. Two ways to start reading:
- Open a volume by selecting its card — it opens the reader at that volume’s first page.
- Jump to a page using the Go to page box. Type any page number across the whole work and select Go to land there directly.
Reading the original pages
The page reader shows the book as it was printed. By default it presents two panes side by side:
- The scan — the original printed page as a high-quality image.
- The text — the page’s text, shown verbatim beside the scan so you can read along.
You can choose how much to see with the view toggle:
| View | Shows |
|---|---|
| Both | The scan and the text side by side. The default. |
| Scan | The printed page image only. |
| Text | The page’s text only. |
To move through the book, use the previous and next arrows in the toolbar. The toolbar also shows where you are — the volume and page number, and your position in the whole work (for example, Vol. 2 · p. 143 · 287/4500).
If a page’s text hasn’t been prepared yet, the text pane says so. The scan is always there to read from.
Getting back
Use the breadcrumb at the top of any work page to step back — to the work, or all the way to the library home. From a single page or entry, it’s the fastest way back out to the whole book.