Dear colleagues,
in November 1999 I had informed you for the first  time on the
project "Virtual Library Middle East / North Africa". An updated
version of the project was presented to those who attended  the
annual meeting of Melcom Int. in Venice in May 2000  ( an
electronic version of my paper is available under
http://www.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/text/vortraege/venedig.htm ).
This  had been a short time after the German Research Foundation
(DFG) had decided to support Halle Univesity Library with this
project.
Today I can inform you that we have started to work on the
project on 1 October 2000. On the project's homepage
http://www.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/ssg/vfbstart.htm
are formulated the principal objectives and recent developments.
At the moment, the main focus of our work is on the construction
of a subject guide, a working version of which is planned to be
ready by  December 2000. After a discussion on this preliminary
version cooperating partners would be invited to send URLs of
Internet sources that -in their view - should be included. The
subject guide will be a searchable database - accessible via WWW
- collecting relevant Internet sources for Middle Eastern and
Islamic studies. All sources in the subject guide will come with
metadata according to the Dublin Core metadata set.
I should like to invite colleagues from the library & information
as well as from the research fields to participate in the project
or/and  to send  their comments.
Sincerly, Lutz Wiederhold

--
Dr. Lutz Wiederhold
Universitaets- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt
06098 Halle
Germany
Tel.: 49-(0)345-55-22164
Fax.: 49-(0)345-55-27140
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http://webis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/ssg/bib.3/ssg.6_23/kontakt.html