Yale University Library Awarded $650,000 Grant to Continue Arabic Digitization Efforts
New Haven, Conn.--A multi-year grant to Yale University Library from the U.S. Department of Education's Technological Innovation Program will support "Gateway to Gazettes" (G2G), a new project that will digitize and make available the gazettes of independent Syria and British Mandate Palestine from 1919 to 1948.
Gazettes are documents of record in which governments publish laws, regulations, and other important notices. For emerging nations, gazettes are particularly important sources of legal, political, social, and cultural history, but existing copies can be difficult to locate and use or are in poor condition. The granted funds total approximately $650,000.
Yale University Librarian Alice Prochaska said, "Yale has a long and important history of supporting research and scholarship on the Middle East. This project also advances Yale's and the Library's goal of sharing our digital collections with researchers around the world. Simon Samoeil, Curator of the Yale Library's Near East Collection, added, "G2G will make rare materials more widely available to researchers. Acquiring the complete run of the Syrian Gazette was a labor of love and persistence, working with owners on the basis that this critical resource would become widely available."
Working with the Yale Law School and Law Library, Yale University Library will bring together two critically important collections of Middle Eastern gazettes: the Syrian Gazette, of which Yale holds one of just five known complete runs, and the Palestine Gazette, which is currently available on microfilm with print supplements. Using state-of-the-art optical character recognition (OCR) for Arabic, the project will digitize approximately 120,000 pages of English, French, and Arabic text and make them available through a searchable web interface.
When launched, G2G will allow users to search and read digitized gazettes without subscription or registration. Standards and best practices for archiving and distributing newly digitized materials will be shared with US and foreign partners, allowing for ongoing collaborative collections of additional digitized Middle Eastern gazettes and government documents.
Blair Kaufman, Librarian and Professor of Lae at Yale Law School, said, "The project will be especially valuable to legal scholars and hsitorians, but also to anyone who wants access to primary source legal documents and an array of related materials from the Middle East. it also supports Yale's mission to make its collections available to scholars worldwide."
Yale University is a leader in digitizing Middle Eastern collections and manages important projects like AMEEL (A Middle Eastern Electronic Library), OACIS (Online Access to Consolidated Information on Serials for the Middle East), and Iraq ReCollections, an NEH-funded project begun in 2006 to digitize a select group of important scholarly Iraqi journals.
