YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
NEW HAVEN, CT  06520-8240


YALE LIBRARY NEWS RELEASE

20 April 2005:  US Department of Education Funds Yale Library's Middle East
Virtual Library Project


New Haven, CT.  The Yale Library announced today that its proposal to
develop A Middle East Electronic Library (AMEEL) has been funded at a level
of $750,000 over four years.  This grant was awarded under the US
Department of Education's Title VI TICFIA (Technological Innovation and
Cooperation for Foreign Information Access) Program.  This program provides
grants to institutions of higher education, public or nonprofit libraries,
or combinations of these institutions or libraries to develop innovative
techniques or programs using new electronic technologies to access,
collect, organize, preserve, and widely disseminate information on world
regions and countries other than the US in order to address our nation's
teaching and research needs in international education and foreign
languages.

Under the four-year term of the AMEEL grant, which begins as of 1 October
2005, Yale library staff will lead and coordinate, in conjunction with
publishing, library, and other partners around the world, a collaborative
virtual library project that will make available important Middle Eastern
resources, in a four-part initiative:  it will (1) develop an
infrastructure for digital content, from diverse sources (freely available
as well as publisher licensed) to be integrated into AMEEL; (2) digitize
key journals on and about the Middle East, with particular emphasis on
fully searchable Arabic texts; (3) build and expand capacity for Arabic
full text scanning into US and other libraries through workshops developed
and led by experts in this area; and (4) develop technologies and protocols
to facilitate interlibrary lending between US and Middle Eastern libraries.

Key partners in this new initiative will include, among others:  The
Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandria, Egypt), which has developed the most
advanced Arabic OCR techniques in the world today); the
<http://www.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/en/index.htm>Universitaets-und
Landesbibliothek of Sachsen-Anhalt (Halle, Germany), with its advanced
development of a Middle East portal including extensive journal tables of
contents; JSTOR (New York, USA); and publishers such as Brill Academic
Publishers (Leiden, the Netherlands); Multidata (Beirut, Lebanon); and
Oxford University Press (UK).  Other libraries in the US and Middle East
will collaborate on this project.  The Yale Library is also adding its own
staff and technology resources to this significant cost-sharing arrangement.

Project AMEEL is the logical next phase following the Library's currently
funded (through September 2005) Title VI project, OACIS (Online Access to
Consolidated Information on Serials).  OACIS is a database of journal and
serial holdings from a group of seven initial US partners plus a
now-growing number of both domestic and international libraries.  The OACIS
database currently holds some 46,000 bibliographical records representing
approximately 13,000 unique serials titles; it has become a key discovery
source for students, scholars, and librarians seeking for information about
serial titles, bibliographical information, and holdings searchable in both
roman and Arabic alphabets.  See <www.library.yale.edu/oacis>.  Project
OACIS will now serve as an integral part of AMEEL, enhancing content
delivery to selected serial titles.

AMEEL and OACIS tie closely with the Library's strategy for expanding
global activities and becoming a widely recognized digital center of
excellence in one or more world regions.  The Middle East is a particularly
appropriate region, as Yale University was one of the earliest higher
education institutions formally to study the Middle East.  Its Library
collections and other faculty and educational resources are among the
strongest in the world.

Closer to the October launch date, project staff will develop an AMEEL Web
site.


FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Ann Okerson, Associate University Librarian, collections & international
programs
Yale University
P. O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT  06520-8240
Phone:              01-203-432-1764
Fax:                  01-203-432-8527
E-mail:              [log in to unmask]