Of possible interest. ________________________________________ YALE LIBRARY NEWS RELEASE AMEEL - Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library Yale University Library 130 Wall Street P. O. Box 208240 New Haven, Connecticut 06520-8240 YALE LIBRARY SIGNS DIGITAL LIBRARY AGREEMENTS WITH INTERNATIONAL PARTNERS New Haven, CT. November 2006. The Yale University Library today announced key international collaborations with partners in Egypt, Germany, and the Netherlands in two granted projects: Project AMEEL (Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library) and Iraq ReCollection. Project AMEEL is developing a Web-based portal, which will integrate new or existing scholarly digital content covering the history, culture, and development in this vibrant region. The Iraq ReCollection project will digitize a select group of the most important scholarly humanistic Iraqi journals held by Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. These digitized journals, digitally preserved and accessible via the Internet, will form part of the AMEEL electronic archive. Both projects propose to develop "best practices" for scanning Arabic language-based humanistic content and to share this expertise with academic libraries worldwide. * The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandria, Egypt) is the modern recreation of that city's ancient and formidable library. Today, the BA is a world leader in library and cultural technological innovations and contributes its considerable expertise to Yale's digital projects, particularly in the digitization of Arabic texts. * The Universitäts-und Landesbibliothek of Sachsen-Anhalt (Halle, Germany) has a long and significant history of contributions to and library leadership in Middle Eastern studies. Halle's university library will contribute to the AMEEL portal with digital fulltext materials created from printed documents of its Middle East collection and with data from its electronic database called ALMISBAH. * Brill Publishers, founded in the 17th century (Leiden, the Netherlands) produces essential scholarly materials concerning the Middle East, including the notable Encyclopedia of Islam. Brill will share its metadata holdings with AMEEL, thus expanding searchable information for Middle Eastern scholars. About Project AMEEL: This grant was awarded under the U.S. Department of Education's Title VI TICFIA Program, which fosters innovative techniques or programs that address national teaching and research needs in international education and foreign languages by using technologies to access, collect, organize, preserve, and widely disseminate information on world regions and countries other than the United States. <http://www.ed.gov/programs/iegpsticfia/index.html> About Iraq ReCollection: In response to the damage sustained by museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions in Iraq, the National Endowment for the Humanities funded an initiative called "Recovering Iraq's Past," to preserve and document resources which, because of their intellectual content and cultural value, are deemed vital for research and education. <http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/20051221.html> For Additional Information, Please Contact: Ann Okerson Associate University Librarian, Collections & International Programs Yale University 130 Wall Street 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] ####