For several years, there has been at the University of California at Los Angeles a chapter of the Onomasticon Arabicum, an international project whose goal is the collection of data from Arabic biographical dictionaries and the storing and retrieval of these data by computer. What follows is a brief outline of the project and its history.

One problem faced by many Western historians of the Middle East and North Africa is a relative ignorance of what is being produced by the local scholars themselves. In the case of the Maghreb, for example, without regular visits to the area, an American researcher may have to wait several years to learn about the publication of a new book or a local research project relevant to his own interests. This observation is certainly true for Tunisia, where a small, active group of historians at the University of Tunis has been examining aspects of Tunisia's political and social evolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but whose works, with few exceptions, are not well known to scholars in America.

This Article consists of a short review of the Arabic and Persian word processing software for the Macintosh computer called AlKaatibTM, as well as a presentation of some of the ways in which it is now being used as a pedagogical and research aid. It should be stated at the outset that although I did not personally develop this software, I was intimately involved with developing the fonts for it, and with testing it in its initial stages, thereby providing input that was incorporated into the present version. This article should therefore be viewed not so much as an outside review of the software, but as an expression by someone who uses it on a daily basis of what it has meant to him.