Draft:RAMBI (Index of Articles on Jewish Studies)

RAMBI (, Index of Articles on Jewish Studies) is a bibliographic database containing a selective list of hundreds of thousands of academic and other articles in various fields of Jewish studies and research on the Land of Israel and the State of Israel. RAMBI is the largest and most comprehensive database of its kind in the world. The articles listed in RAMBI are collected from thousands of journals - in print or electronic form, and from article collections, in Hebrew, Latin, or Cyrillic letters. The information is gathered from thousands of academic journals - printed and electronic - collections and article compilations, most of which are found in the National Library's collection. The database is updated daily.

History
RAMBI was founded in 1966 by Dr. Issachar Joel, as an expansion of a project that had previously appeared in the bibliographic journal Kiryat Sefer. In 1969, the first issue of RAMBI was published, listing approximately 2,500 articles published in 1966. The introduction to the issue stated: "An attempt has been made here to record in professional order the articles in Jewish studies that appeared in 1966 in Hebrew journals and collections, and in 1966 in foreign language journals and collections." The articles in the issue were arranged by sections and subsections, and as written in the introduction: "The internal order in each section and subsection is, as far as possible, according to the subject ... and if such a possibility does not exist, according to the alphabetical order of the authors' names." At the end of the issue, indexes appeared: subjects, people, places, books, and more, and an index of article authors. The indexes were edited by Asia Neuberg. Dr. Issachar Joel continued to edit RAMBI issues until his death in 1977.

Transition to Digital Catalog
In 1985, the transition to digital cataloging began (at first in a digital catalog, which was accessible from the library's computers). In parallel with the digital catalog, the printed annual volume was also published. With the release of the fiftieth issue in 2000, the printed journal ceased to appear. Since then, the database has been updated continuously only on the website. In recent years, articles predating 1966 have also been added, mainly from journals that were scanned and uploaded to the internet on JSTOR and other databases, with the aim of offering as comprehensive coverage as possible of academic research in Jewish studies.

RAMBI Today
The RAMBI database serves researchers and students in various fields of humanities from around the world.

A typical bibliographic record in the RAMBI database contains the name of the author or authors, the title of the article, the name of the journal or article collection in which the article appeared, the issue details, page numbers, year of publication, and language of the article. Until about 2010, the records included subject classification according to a unique subject tree for the database, which contained both broad classification (for example, "Diaspora Judaism") and more detailed classification.

With the National Library's transition to a unified catalog for all its collections, the various catalogs of different departments, the book catalog, the manuscript catalog and manuscript photographs, archives departments, maps, music, and more were unified, and the RAMBI database was also added to this catalog. With the unification, the subject classification in RAMBI switched to the Library of Congress Subject Headings system.

The RAMBI system organizationally belongs to the National Library of Israel and is located in its new building in the Kiryat HaLeom.