Digitization Of Arabic Language Books Workshop And Conference
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The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is organizing the “Digitization of Arabic Language Books Conference” from 21 to 25 February 2006 in collaboration with Stanford University and Yale University, supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The main aim is to foster the development of an international cooperative effort for the digitization of Arabic-language books.
The working group will meet for a public discussion of this subject. With leaders of Arabic librarianship and digitization experts from Egypt, the wider Middle East, the UK and the USA, the working group will include people from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT), Stanford University, Yale University, the British Library, Oxford University, and others. The working group is to scope a project, including both technical and collections aspects, and draft a proposal for funding it. The proposal, once perfected and polished, will eventually be presented to likely funding agencies.
The significant impact of the large scale digitization of the Arabic Literature regionally and internationally and on both the short and long terms has attracted very eminent and decision making figures to participate and enrich the conference with their valuable input. Because of the leadership of Egyptian organizations in the digitization field, the Egyptian side will be highly represented by H.E. Dr. Tarek Kamel, Minister of Communication and Information Technology, Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Dr. Hoda Baraka, Senior Deputy to the Minister of Communication and Information Technology and others from Egyptian and multinational organizations. The Middle East will be represented by Prof. Muhammad Al-Raqab, Director of University of Jordan Libraries, Dr. Nabil Ades, Vice President for Academic Affairs of University of Aleppo in Syria and other delegates from Iraq and Lebanon. The USA side, headed by Mr. Michael Keller, University Librarian & Director of Academic Information Resources of Stanford University in cooperation with colleagues from Yale University Library, Oxford University and the British Library has exerted great effort to make this conference come true.
There is no question that digitization of the world’s literatures is one of the transformative ideas of our time. However, it is evident that large scale endeavors in that effort have many political, economic, legal and operational dimensions, and that they will be uneven in execution. As organizers of this effort, we are planning to assure that the Arabic literatures will be made much more broadly and easily available, in effect complementing what Google intends for Roman-alphabet (especially English and Western European language) literatures. Our aim is to develop over time a virtual library of Arabic materials available including hundreds of thousands of texts and the means of finding them – and grow from there.
This project will bridge many divides, and will have the effect of sharing expertise between Arab World professionals with both technical exposure and (of course) language skills, and Western librarian/technicians with a track record of scalable digitization projects as well as a trans-national perspective for collection development. The beneficiaries of this collaboration, beside the participations themselves, will be the global community of Arabic-readers, researchers and learners.
The expected outcome will be a coordinated approach to funding for large scale, efficient, consistent, useful digitization of Arabic literatures, and thus eventually to making those literatures available globally.
For more information please visit the conference website at www.bibalex.org/DigiArab
Click here for the conference program
Click here for the Workshop Program