Library Projects and Activities in or about...

MIDDLE EASTERN AND ISLAMIC CUISINE: THE TRADITION CONTINUES
From Babylonian clay tablets containing the oldest known cooking recipes, to medieval manuscript treatises from Baghdad, Persia, and Andalusia, to modern books published in the Middle East as well as in the West, this appetizing exhibition presented by the Near East Collection celebrates the richness and diversity of a culinary tradition spanning thousand of years and three continents at least. A bibliographic cornucopia which is, at the same time, a visual treat and a reminder to the palate.

Sterling Memorial Library (Memorabilia Room), February 1 - April 19, 2007.

AMEEL
Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library (AMEEL) is a project funded for four years (ending October 2009) by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI Grant. AMEEL enlarges and expands the work of OACIS (see below), which is the bibliographical building block for AMEEL goals. These include: digitizing of about 100,000 pages of scholarly journal content from 10 Middle Eastern countries; providing for training sessions in Arabic digitization; developing workshops to facilitate technologically delivered interlibrary-loan between U.S. and Middle Eastern libraries; and building a substantial amount of technology infrastructure to partner with other information providers (of scholarly journals) to link their resources into AMEEL as a portal for scholarly Middle Eastern information. Partners include the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, and the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek in Halle, Germany, as well as several publishers and U.S. libraries. Tishreen University (Syria), Balamand University, and American University in Beirut (Lebanon) are early partners in the document delivery parts of this effort.

Iraq ReCollection
This $100,000 project is funded by a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), ending December 2007. The grant will allow Yale Library to: (1) digitize and character-scan about 100,000 pages of some of the most important scholarly humanistic Iraqi journals; (2) create an electronic archive of the digitized journals that both allows them to be accessed via the Internet and at the same time lets them be integrated into other electronic library systems; (3) develop in this pilot project standards and practices for digitizing Arabic and Middle-East language-based books and journals in the humanities, in order to facilitate future work which, by adhering to standards, will be cost-effective and will have as wide scholarly and general use as possible.

OACIS
Online Access to Consolidated Information on Serials (OACIS) is a project funded for three years plus one extension year (2002-Oct. 2006) by a U.S. Department of Education Title VI Grant. OACIS is a partnership project which is creating a large bibliographical database of records for journals and serials from and about the Middle East. Beginning initially with a handful of 6-7 contributing U.S. partner libraries, OACIS has grown now to 20 international contributors, including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt; the University of Jordan; Tishreen University (Syria); and the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek (ULB) in Halle, Germany. OACIS now holds over 40,000 detailed records representing 18,000 distinctive titles, from the 22 countries of the Middle East plus Western/U.S. partners.

BLACK GOLD: Geopolitics of Oil in the Middle East
A collaboration of the Babylonian and Near East Collections, this exhibition traces the history and current geopolitical impact of oil in the Middle East and the world at large. For millennia, note the organizers, the sands of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf region were considered no more than wastelands traversed by wandering Bedouins. However, with the discovery of oil in the late 19th century came the realization of the wealth beneath those golden sands. Often described as "black gold," oil has become one of the world's most prized commodities, and a moving force behind modern societies, industries and civilization.

Sterling Memorial Library, July- October 31, 2006

MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS FROM CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
This exhibition highlights manuscripts in the Beinecke Library from the tenth century to the nineteenth, in Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian, documenting the activities of Christians in the Middle East.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, June - September 2006

MUSLIM CONTRIBUTIONS TO MEDIEVAL MEDICINE AND PHARMACOLOGY
This exhibition provides a positive insight into the important contributions made to the medical field by medieval Muslim scholars and doctors, by showing a collection of manuscripts from the Historical Medical collection at the Yale Medical Library.

Sterling Memorial Library, May 1 - December 31, 2005

Middle East Microform Project (MEMP)
The Middle East Microform Project (MEMP) was established in 1987 by the Middle East Librarians Association with the purpose of cooperatively acquiring microform copies of unique, scarce, rare and unusually bulky and expensive research material pertaining to the field of Middle Eastern studies; and to preserve deteriorating printed and manuscript materials of scholarly value. The geographic coverage of MEMP includes materials from or on the Arab countries, Israel, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia and other related areas not covered in other cooperative microform projects.Since its inception, MEMP has acquired approximately 100 newspaper titles in Arabic, Turkish, and English, including a large collection of Sudanese and Turkish papers. Other projects include the microfilming of a large pamphlet file of materials on the Middle East at the Library of Congress and the microfilming of the Cosro Chaqeri Collection of Iranian Left-wing Materials.

Time frame: 1987 onward

Contact: Simon Samoeil, Curator, Near East Collection

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