Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library

http://www.library.yale.edu/ameel/

Yale University Library
130 Wall Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Phone: (203) 432-1764

Principal Investigator:
Ann Okerson
ann.okerson@yale.edu

Project Manager:
Elizabeth Beaudin
elizbeth.beaudin@yale.edu

Project Outreach Director:
Simon Samoeil
simon.samoeil.@yale.edu

Digitization Specialist:
Jennifer Weintraub
jennifer.weintraub@yale.edu

Dollar Allocation Year 1: $188,000

Project Overview:
Middle Eastern library content, particularly Arabic and other non-Roman language materials, poses special challenges to the creation of digital libraries. AMEEL seeks to lay the foundations for future progress and to build a working library by a twofold strategy:

  1. To create a prototype Web-based portal for study of the Middle East, including its history, culture, development, and contemporary face, and to integrate existing scholarly digital content with this portal to make such material easier to find and use efficiently and freely.
  2. To develop an environment for creating new digital resources, as well as integrating existing resources into a common structure. We will also tackle in particular the challenges of digitization and the opportunities for technologically assisted interlibrary borrowing and lending.
Project AMEEL will move rapidly on the underlying structural and integration component of the project, create a resource useful in its own right in the near future, and establish an architecture and standards for all who wish to participate in the common project, thus enabling others to see the benefit and to add the ir resources and energy.

The first stage of AMEEL will establish an 'integration infrastructure', both to create a useful resource rapidly and to put in place an architecture for future development. AMEEL will then work with partners to develop international standards for digitization of Arabic-language materials and to support would-be providers of digital information in Arabic. Finally, AMEEL will conduct a pilot Interlibrary Loan project with a small number of libraries in the U.S., Europe, and particularly the Middle East to prove the viability of the physical exchange of materials or technically facilitated representations of those materials (faxes, photocopies, photographs) where digitization has not yet occurred.

A successful project will offer both a working library for U.S. and international information seekers and at the same time will make a major contribution by encouraging multiple projects that create new resources or integrate existing ones into the architecture we develop.

In Project AMEEL, Yale University Library, leading a partnership of committed international collaborators (see above), will design and construct a digital library that focuses on the Middle East (ME). We will begin this online library by creating a front end or "portal," into which we will integrate a significant portion of currently available ME electronic resources, including bibliographic records, selected abstracts, full text, and other formats in the Roman and particularly non-Roman, vernacular scripts. In order to sustain the effort over time, we will design a scalable methodology for adding newly created digital materials from and about the ME region, originating from a variety of participants including libraries, publishers, and commercial sources.

This project builds upon and will make frequent reference to OACIS (Online Access to Consolidated Information about Serials) that created an online union list of serials held in U.S., European, and ME libraries and covering ME subjects. That project was also led out of the Yale University Library and funded by TICFIA.

To create AMEEL – with the objective of enhancing resources available for U.S. scholarly study and research – we will draw from international (US, European and Middle Eastern) expertise of academic and information technology specialists to produce a gateway to knowledge that is more than a collection of links and a search engine and that is structured in a way that will let it grow with addition of new resources while retaining its power to organize and assist the reader's investigations. In addition, we will bring deep expertise in handling technical challenges related to non-Western languages such as Arabic into the U.S. university arena. As a result of our partnered effort, (1) information creators in U.S. institutions will become proficient in Arabic text digitization and character recognition, qualified to lead digitization, preservation, and document delivery efforts, while (2) establishing a digital library from which students and scholars may gain more comprehensive knowledge about the ME. In short, we plan to create mechanisms, skills, and information resources to be shared widely with others, in academe and beyond.

Our digital library will go beyond providing a proprietary subset of information with ad hoc interfaces that have, however broadly they "cover" the subject matter, an ultimately narrowing effect for the way they limit the reader to the horizons of the provider's resources. Academic research librarians and area specialists already build subject-based Web pages arranged by discipline, embracing in turn other lists of sites. While these are excellent beginnings, the true value-adding power of a library (i.e., selection, analysis, integration, standardization of forms of access as far as possible) is imperfectly realized in such a setting.

Our plan begins with bibliographical records, which exist largely because they were developed in an earlier project. To these we will add full text content, followed by services for users. The content will be provided through digitizing efforts of the AMEEL partners, as well as from partners who are among the leading full text content providers of ME scholarly materials. Conversations with publishers of Middle Eastern materials, along with the growing coherence and consistency of the field's self-understanding and its dependence on information resources, have further encouraged us to believe that the time is ripe to create an appropriate test bed to support a robust, rich, and well-structured "portal" to digital information across the whole discipline, arranged in ways that make it a genuine digital library for students, scholars, and information seekers at every level.

Why AMEEL? Increasingly, the academic community needs and demands coordinated access to general or specific content, across formats, media, and sources. ME studies lag behind other scholarly areas in the creation of a digital library that responds to these needs. While there is a proliferation today of dependable and robust academic information sites regarding the ME, these sites often exist on their own as custom products of a particular institution. Nothing pulls them together for ease of use. In many cases, links provide only first level results by identifying an item and possibly its location, but without providing full content or an access path to it. Furthermore, the user normally needs prior knowledge of available resources and then has to search these individually to find desired information. Finally, it is hard in such an environment to identify the gaps – to know what is missing.

Integration. Organized gateways to information and materials about or in the ME do exist in some quantity, yet they are often of a commercial nature or related to daily needs, such as real estate agents in Abu Dhabi or charter travel to ME countries. The integration portion of Project AMEEL intends to construct a truly comprehensive scholarly library that focuses on the ME. This will lead to greater visibility for specific projects, greater potential for communication, greater coordination, and more elimination of duplication of effort. The digital library will reach a broader range of readers and users, particularly important in reaching a new generation of readers needing to be well informed about ME affairs.

Developing AMEEL creates significant opportunities. First, because content valuable to the planned digital library may have been published, recorded, or otherwise produced in Arabic and other non-Roman scripts, as well as in Western languages, we will explore improved application of technology to standards of representation and methods of acquisition (especially digital scanning). Second, integrating diverse electronic resources will give rise to considerable analysis and thorough planning to construct a common environment that is both scalable and, wherever possible, freely accessible to readers. AMEEL will achieve robust and intelligible standards that all can adhere to, the better to enable information to migrate easily to other settings and to be used alongside materials created elsewhere. While an initial prototype portal will emerge quickly, the larger integration challenge will be to make the fused content searchable in both English and Arabic, and deliverable, if possible, without costly subscription or license.

In addition, the portal to the digital library – an evolving electronic space consisting of Internet links, electronic materials in separate systems or catalogs, and newly digitized materials – will also possess overarching mechanisms that permit the user to perform cross-collection searches while still able to view, read, or listen to the specific items identified in the search results. Technical experts both at Yale and at collaborating institutions in Europe and the ME will coordinate their talents to develop the proposed middleware to tackle challenges of multilingual searching as well as storage and retrieval of information held in diverse sources, catalogs, and databases and involving non-Roman script represented languages. Finally, the technical team will design this middle layer of software based on open source standards that encourage the free redistribution of software and the sharing of its source code.

Digitization. Scholars value information about resources available in traditional libraries but what they increasingly prefer, for reasons of utility and productivity, is access to online full-text content. Catalog information about materials no longer satisfies today's scholarly users. But publishers and vendors will never digitize many older full text items such as books and journals from the ME. The business case is not strong enough: there is not a large enough paying market for such materials and the costs of digitization are significant. These materials, however, particularly many journals, are vitally important for education and research. AMEEL will digitize a significant sampling of such materials. In addition, the AMEEL team in conjunction with the staff at the Digital Lab at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, will develop, organize, and facilitate digitization training sessions to be held at the BA.

Interlibrary Loan (ILL). Scholarly information in libraries in the ME has to date been either extremely difficult or altogether impossible to identify and obtain from ME libraries. Prior explorations, during the OACIS periodicals union list project, identified the issues regarding ILL for ME materials. ILL was assumed at the outset of OACIS to be something that would occur "naturally," given the existence of a union list. While OACIS was able to build an international union list of serials for a growing number of libraries, the ILL piece of the project was not particularly successful outside of the circle of U.S. and western libraries that already use ILL services. ME libraries have important and unique collections not available in the U.S., and they do not have a tradition of sharing resources through ILL, which means that not only is sharing among their libraries limited, but also that U.S. libraries cannot borrow materials from those libraries except in rare circumstances using personal connections. The ILL experience of the OACIS group has persuaded us to develop a component of AMEEL concentrating at the outset on the development of an ILL framework for ME libraries. ILL is not simply a set of tasks or a technical transmission of a request and its fulfilling document. Rather, ILL involves policy at an institutional level, development of procedures that fit institutional workflows, an understanding of copyright law both nationally and internationally, and the potential to expand a circle of participating libraries both within a country and beyond its borders. AMEEL will lay the further technology foundations for such ILL and will promote a culture of ILL-based resource sharing among libraries in the region.

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