Associate Professor Dr. Serhat Aras Tuna, a faculty member of the History Department of Muş Alparslan University, published an article in Belleten, an internationally respected journal of the Turkish Historical Society.
Abstract
Yearbooks are documents that contain the entirety of a year's events. The first of these yearbooks, which are frequently used in historical research, was published in the Ottoman Empire in 1847. The majority of official yearbooks are classified as state (general), provincial and ministry yearbooks. Official yearbooks were prepared by commissions consisting of various civil servants. Since the information in the yearbooks had to be updated every year, the yearbook preparation committees collected information from relevant places and used it. This process was carried out by preparing correction forms. Although information was updated through correction forms, errors in information or spelling mistakes often occurred. Therefore, correction and additional tables were added to the yearbooks. Some corrections were made upon the requests, complaints or investigations of the officials and these could contain significant information errors. Therefore, corrections were applied in two methods as ordinary and extraordinary. In this study, the correction methods applied in the official Ottoman yearbooks and the methods of their implementation were examined. In the examination, it was determined that the issue of correction was considered extremely important by the administrators. Therefore, correction was reflected in the correspondences in the high-level bureaucracy. Official yearbooks and Ottoman archive documents were consulted in the study. The yearbooks in the Islamic Research Center (İSAM) database were used in the study. All the general yearbooks were examined and a sample was created from the provincial yearbooks. The Ministry yearbooks were partially used. The corrections detected in the yearbooks were compared with the correspondences in the archive documents. The aim of the study is to provide a guide to researchers in the writing phase of the yearbook literature.
