Middle East Electronic Library
The Yale Library's proposal to develop A Middle East Electronic Library (AMEEL) has received a four-year $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education.
The project is funded by the federal Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign Information Access Program, which seeks to strengthen the nation's teaching and research in international education and foreign languages by developing innovative ways to access, collect, organize, preserve and disseminate information on world regions and countries other than the United States.
Beginning in October, the Yale Library staff will lead and coordinate a virtual library project with partner institutions around the world. The groups will work to develop an infrastructure for digital content for AMEEL; digitize key journals about the Middle East, with particular emphasis on fully searchable Arabic texts; build and expand capacity for Arabic full text scanning into U.S. and other libraries through workshops developed and led by experts in this area; and create technologies and protocols to facilitate interlibrary lending between U.S. and Middle Eastern libraries.
Key partners in this new initiative will include: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, which boasts the most advanced Arabic optical character recognition techniques in the world; the Universitaets-und Landesbibliothek of Sachsen-Anhalt in Halle, Germany, which has developed a Middle East portal including extensive journal tables of contents; JSTOR, a scholarly journal electronic archive in New York; and publishers such as Brill Academic Publishers in the Netherlands, Multidata in Lebanon; and Oxford University Press in the United Kingdom. Other libraries in the United States and Middle East will collaborate on this project. The Yale Library is also adding its own staff and technology resources to this significant cost-sharing arrangement.
Project AMEEL is the next phase in the Yale Library's current Online Access to Consolidated Information on Serials (OACIS) project, a database of journal and serial holdings from an ever-growing number of libraries worldwide. The OACIS database currently holds some 46,000 bibliographical records representing approximately 13,000 unique serials titles; it has become a key discovery source for students, scholars and librarians. Project OACIS will serve as an integral part of AMEEL, enhancing content delivery to selected serial titles.
Both the AMEEL and OACIS projects reflect the Yale Library's goal of expanding its global activities and becoming a widely recognized digital center of excellence in one or more world regions. Yale was one of the earliest higher education institutions to offer formal study of the Middle East, and its library collections and other faculty and educational resources are considered among the strongest in the world.
For information on OACIS, visit www.library.yale.edu/oacis. An AMEEL website will be available closer to the October launch date.
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