Since the 1960s and ‘70s, libraries in the West have been digitizing their catalogues and even the contents of their shelves, but a lack of resources has kept all but the most well funded Middle Eastern libraries from doing the same. The Yale University Library hopes to correct this situation, bringing the fruits of Middle Eastern scholars’ labors into the digital age.

Although the ivy-league university based in Connecticut has received $1.3 million in funding from the US’ Department of Education (DOE) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) since the digitizing efforts began five years ago, the continuing success of their two projects depends as much on the enthusiasm of the participants as on their continued funding.

The first project, Online Access for Consolidated Information about Serials (OACIS), is a searchable list of catalogue information compiled from the 20 participating libraries around the world, including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) and that of the American University in Cairo. The OACIS list is composed entirely of catalogue data of scholarly journals from and about the Middle East.

“The catalogue records are information about the journals, they are not the stuff itself,” explains Ann Okerson, Yale’s associate university librarian for collections and international programs. “The ‘sexy’ word is ‘metadata’.”

OACIS had a rough start, beginning as it did in October 2001. In the uncertain months following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, Okerson says, “All the things we wanted to do became so much harder. Forget about contacts, information, whatever. It just took a while to get back to the ability to communicate, to deal with people, try to bring them over to the US to meet and work with us. Our first year’s budget was significantly under-spent as a result.”

With the understanding and cooperation of the DOE’s program officer, however, the project caught its stride. Okerson explains that OACIS now has “a collection of tens of thousands of records listing about 20,000 distinctive journal titles about the Middle East.”

Okerson is also interested in working with the Egyptian National Library and Archives (ENLA) to bring its “stunning collection of books, manuscripts, journals, and others materials” into OACIS. This hasn’t been easy, as ENLA’s catalogue and those of other national libraries are not fully digitized.

“I would kill to get the National Library of Egypt’s and the National Library of Syria’s records into OACIS,” she says. “Well, no! I wouldn’t kill, but gosh, it would be so fabulous — Tunisia, Algeria, and so on.

“We’ve been talking to them and saying ‘when?’ And I think everyone’s willing, it’s just a matter of when will there be enough automation at those libraries to make it possible.”

Access to OACIS is freely available through the project website (www.library.yale.edu/oacis). The database can be searched in English, Arabic, French, Spanish and German.

“Anybody can access it,” Okerson explains, “but you need the internet connection, you need a computer, a fast connection that actually works. That’s a challenge in many [Middle Eastern] countries.”

OACIS is a collection of information about information, but Yale is also trying to bring “the stuff itself” online through a second project, started in October 2005, called AMEEL, short for A Middle East Electronic Library.

“In AMEEL we actually start digitizing the journals themselves, [or] we start working with publishers who have digitized journals,” the Yale librarian says. “In some cases publishers have done this, in most cases nobody has done it.

“What we’re trying to do then over the course of a four-year project is to link the records (i.e., the metadata in OACIS) with actual content. As the project moves ahead, gradually it’s going to be possible to click on the record in OACIS and move directly to the full text of the scholarly journal.”

This is a much more labor-intensive project, as it requires scanning print materials and processing them with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Much of the content for AMEEL is in Arabic.

“Arabic is hard to scan,” says Okerson. “It’s got funny dots, and sometimes they could be considered by the software to be scanning mistakes and deleted — but often they’re real. In fact the accuracy rate in English language OCR software accuracy is often 99 percent or better; with this stuff, it’s closer to 75 [to] 85 percent, which means we’ve got a lot of repairing to do.”

Yale does some of this OCR processing, but a great deal is also done here. “Our major partner in AMEEL is the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt. They are the most sophisticated technologically when it comes to digitizing and OCR of Arabic materials,” says Okerson. “They have an excellent IT division with excellent leadership. They have been doing scanning of scholarly books under something called the Million Books Project, which is a global project, for several years. They’ve probably scanned 20,000 or more scholarly books and done OCR on many of them.

“Without the Alexandria expertise, this would be a lot harder to do. We’re also going to be sending over to Alexandria a number of our [image files of scanned pages] for actual processing into OCR. I’m not saying they’re going to do all of the OCRing for AMEEL, but they’ll do a whole bunch of that for us because they have the capability and staff expertise.”

Because much of the material in AMEEL is still under copyright, Okerson explains it will be difficult to offer it freely as is done with OACIS. “With AMEEL and the materials that we digitize for inclusion, I hope at least the older, out-of-copyright materials will be free. If we are going through a publisher’s gateway for content, what readers will be able to access and whether it’s free or not will depend on the publisher.”

The AMEEL project spawned a daughter project funded by a $100,000 grant from the NEH. The two-year Iraq ReCollection project, begun in January 2006, should see the digitization of 100,000 pages of scholarly journals from Iraq.

The DOE funding for OACIS ended in October, but all the participating libraries have agreed to continue to support the project. AMEEL’s grant is good for another three years, but Okerson is already looking beyond that.

“AMEEL isn’t like OACIS — it’s much more complicated; it isn’t going to be able to run itself after four years,” she says. “We’ll still be adding content to it, so we need to find ways to sustain what is going to be a hugely growing amount of material.”

While an advisory committee has begun to investigate funding options such as running AMEEL as a subscription-based service, Okerson insists “I’d really like to be able to make this content free, at least in the [Middle East]. The sustainability issues for AMEEL are very large, and it would be a pity in another three years to say ‘Well that’s it. That was fun, we learned a lot. We’re going to go on to the next project.’ I don’t think anyone who’s working on it right now feels that way.”

Okerson is not worried by the many challenges involved in these projects. “Don’t you think it’s fun to do something that’s difficult? You can actually see that you’re getting somewhere with it, and it seems really valuable.”  et