Otzar HaHochma and Bar Ilan libraries, the largest digital databases containing thousands of Judaic books, are now available to the general public free of charge.
By Anash.org reporter
As the fast-spreading coronavirus closes many schools and yeshivos, and people are urged to stay home, the world’s largest Jewish digital libraries, Otzar HaHochma and Bar Ilan, have now been made available to the general public free of charge.
Otzar HaHochma, is the world’s largest digital library containing more than 100,000 Judaic books, scanned page after page in their original format, and it expands its collection by about 5,000 titles annually.
The highlight of Otzar HaHochma is its sophisticated search engine, based on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) with a very high precision rate, it allows maximum accessibility to the content of the books simply by typing a word or sequence of words.
Bar Ilan’s Online Responsa Project encompasses the best of the Jewish sources and all texts are fully and professionally typed in, proofread and hyper-linked.
The database includes Tanach and its principal commentaries, Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi with commentaries, Midrash, Zohar, Rambam, Shulchan Aruch with commentaries, a large Responsa collection of questions and answers (‘Shut’), and the Talmudic Encyclopedia.
The overall volume of the online project, which is frequently updated, is now reaching to 200 million words. The ‘Shut’ includes 100,000 Halachic laws over a period of thousands of years, from all over the world. Extensive biographical data on the authors of Responsa texts have been added as well.