Training Librarians and Faculty in Syria

Digital Libraries, Consortium-Building, and Licensing

Ann Okerson, Associate University Librarian for Collections and International Programs, Yale University

Damascus, Syria, is probably the oldest continually-inhabited city in the world. If it is not, then the title falls to its northern neighbor, Aleppo. On the northwestern coast of Syria, not far from the city of Latakia, the ruins of ancient Ugarit (Ras Shamra) include the site of one of the very oldest libraries anywhere in the world, where some years ago were discovered poetic texts that predate and anticipate the familiar Psalms of the Hebrew scriptures.

For an American librarian (a first-generation offspring of a family from the merely medieval city of Kiev, for that matter) to go to Syria in 2005 to train professionals in that society in the techniques and opportunities of contemporary librarianship was a sobering and exhilarating experience at the same time. Syria has been much in the news media in the last year, for predictable and often discouraging reasons. I found before visiting there in November, under sponsorship of Soros-funded eIFL Project (Electronic Information for Libraries), that many of American friends expressed fears for my safety and doubted the prudence of the visit. For what was my third visit in the last five years, I am happy to say those fears were unfounded and the results of the trip highly encouraging.

The major challenge we addressed was that of helping librarians and administrators from the region to understand how they can work together to build consortia that can in turn negotiate from a position of strength with vendors of electronic information to obtain better terms for licensing that information (databases, journals, and the like) for their users. We have been exploring the power of these activities among libraries in the US and around the world (see <http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia>) for some years, but bringing libraries in emerging countries to the point where they can take advantage of these opportunities requires them to learn to think in new ways about their jobs and their opportunities.

We had given similar workshops for eIFL last year in Laos and Cambodia, countries challenged by their long history of underdevelopment, warfare (and worse), and governments openly hostile at times to the ways of western commerce. By comparison, the Middle East is much more open, progressive, and ready to advance, but there remain significant roadblocks. The presence of two Iraqi librarians in particular offered a direct window into not only the crises of Iraqi society but also the "normalcy" – that is, the way in which serious, professional people struggle there to continue to do the business of a society that all hope finds its feet and builds the basis for cultural and material progress in the years to come.

By comparison, Syria is a burgeoning commercial society, hindered in its growth for a variety of reasons, but still showing every sign of readiness to be a consumer culture in the western mold. I think of the elaborate chocolate shop not far from our hotel in Damascus, one that turns out to be part of a Lebanese-founded chain specializing in high quality chocolate presented in the Middle Eastern style – where the elaborate silver serving dish in which the gift arises is almost as important as the chocolate itself! A friend caught a snapshot in the ancient souk in Aleppo of a package of "cat blankets" – that is, acrylic bedding material for your feline – that advertised on the shiny plastic pack that they were the product of a Saudi/Syrian/Korean business – and sure enough, the web provides the details: http://www.sskblankets.com/. The professionals from Syria were able to tell us stories about the difficulties of getting things done in an environment with political, economic, and technical challenges, but their energy and even optimism heartened us all.

We spent two full days working through the main lines of doing business in the new world of libraries. It is encouraging and important that many academic and scientific publishers in the economically advanced countries of the world have recognized the need to support economic and social development in other parts of the world by making their information products available at reduced price terms (sometimes free or nearly free) with appropriate safeguards. (See <http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/develop.shtml> for some examples.) But none of this is easy or transparent in a society where bandwidth is sometimes hard to come by, where as recently as five years ago it was almost impossible to get network connections outside the country, and where regulation still hamstrings much of what serious readers and researchers would like to do.

Yale's Library is well-positioned to continue to engage with Middle Eastern librarians in support of the growth of modern information resources. Three years ago, a grant from the US Department of Education supported a project to bring together catalogues of scholarly journals on Middle Eastern subjects– including quite rare ones held only in Middle Eastern libraries – in a unified catalogue of titles and library holdings, now making it possible for researchers around the world to learn of and locate important research materials. Following that, a second grant now supports AMEEL – A Middle Eastern Electronic Library, which is taking first steps to build a more robust collection of research materials useful to scholars and students inside and outside the region. In January 2006, I will have participated in a workshop at the new "Library of Alexandria" – itself a groundbreaking venture in connecting old and new in that part of the world – that will brainstorm further developments, and in February, Yale will take part in a second workshop in Alexandria to develop large-scale digitization projects in the Arabic language – which poses, because of its highly variable scripts and fonts, significant challenges to mass production of digital representations.

Syria and the Middle East will remain on the front pages of our newspapers and blogs for a long time to come. It is reassuring to know that developments in the domain of research and cultural exploration are taking shape and growing, to help serious people in all societies do a better job of understanding past and present and of thinking collaboratively and constructively about the future. The enthusiasm of the participants at the Damascus workshop convinces me that there is much to look forward to.