1. Withthe Year ofReading already
underway,Dubaihasannounced
a plethora of plans designed to
get people more interested in
Arabicbooksandliterature.
A new Dh1 billion library is set
toopeninJaddafnextyear,butin
the meantime, the Mohammed
bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foun-
dation has already launched the
first phase of the Dubai Digital
Library.
The DDL aims to preserve na-
tional heritage, culture and
identity, while building bridges
of communication and under-
standingbetweencultures.
Jamal bin Huwaireb, the man-
agingdirectorofthefoundation,
says the first phase involves dig-
itising more than 1,600 books
from a wide range of genres,
including language, medicine,
pharmacy, geography history,
religion, sociology, biographies
andmore.
“It’s a long story, but this has
taken us a few years,” he says.
“Wearealsoplanningphasetwo,
which will be a huge collection.
It’s not only books – we’re talk-
ing about pictures, maps, man-
uscripts.”
DDL is collaborative effort that
will enlist the help of the public
through suggestions, annota-
tionsandrecommendations.
“This is very important – let
people work with you,” says
bin Huwaireb. “You cannot
be everywhere, you cannot do
everything.”
Theproject will make extensive
useofsocialmedia.Usersubmis-
sions will be assessed by moder-
ators,whowilldecidewhichsug-
gestionstoactupon.
“It will be user-friendly, so peo-
ple can use it and play with it,”
says bin Huwaireb. “It’s not just
logging onto a website, we want
ittobeveryinteractive–video,au-
dio,everything.”
The existing collection mostly
consists of older books, related
toheritageandtradition,thatare
in the public domain and free to
access – but the library will also
encourage unpublished authors
tosubmitworkthatcanbeviewed
forafee.
“I believe there are more than
2,000 Arabic books translated
in Pakistan, India and Europe
every year. We just need to se-
curetherightsforDDL,”saysbin
Huwaireb. The collection will
include also audiobooks, news-
papers, magazines and diction-
aries, and will work closely with
universities.
“Students don’t know where to
go and if they go to a normal li-
brary, they need
to stay for ages
untiltheyfindthe
information they
need,” says bin
Huwaireb. “With
this library, they
can find the in-
formation with
oneclick.”
Digitising Ara-
bic literature has
its challenges.
New York Uni-
versity Abu Dha-
bi began work on its own digital
library, Arabic Collections On-
line, in 2007. Nine years later, it
contains just under 2,000 digital
books.
Virginia Danielson, director of
the library at NYUAD, says the
largest hurdle has been the state
of Optical Character Recogni-
tion(OCR) technology, which
is used to scan
the characters.
“Because Arabic
has three forms
of each letter,
it’s not as easy to
train an OCR sys-
tem to recognise
words,” she says.
“You can get it
to recognise in-
dividual words,
but sometimes it
can’t deal with a
sentencesyntax.
“There are some systems out
there that work better for Arabic
thanothers,buttheyalltakeafair
amountofhumaninterventionto
getthemtoworkaswellasauser
would want.” Most of the avail-
able OCR systems function at
about40percentaccuracy–they
canbetrainedtoreachmorethan
85 per cent, but this takes a lot of
timeandenergy.
“All of this applies to modern
fonts,” says Danielson. “If you
have older fonts, then you’ve got
another problem – and if you’ve
got older paper, sometimes the
letters bleed through from one
side of the page to the other, and
then the system doesn’t know
whattodo,becauseitcan’trecog-
niseanything.”
NYUAD decided to start by
scanning books, then imple-
mentOCRwhenthesoftwareim-
proves.Whilesomeprogrammes
andprojectsareprogressing,old-
ertextsstillprovedifficult.
“I think initially, since we start-
ed our project, people have been
glad to have what you present to
them,”saysDanielson.“Theylike
the books and the greater variety
thebetter.”
Some users, however, are look-
ingforveryspecificinformation–
especiallyscholars.
“They’re looking for a topic, so
theywanttosearchthebooksfor
that word or phrase,” she says.
“Or,ifit’sliterature,they’reinter-
ested in a concept, or a use of a
word – and so that’s where OCR
becomesimportant.”
Despite such technical chal-
lenges,thelibraryhasprovedim-
menselypopular.
“Juststartingthisfall,westarted
workingwithlibrarians, figuring
that they would have more pa-
tiencewiththedifficultiesofsuch
things as OCR than the normal
publicwould,”shesays.
“So,wewouldstartbyjustwork-
ing with librarians and publicis-
ing in the Middle East, Europe
andNorthAmerica. But, wehave
donenothingwithglobalpublic-
ity, and yet we’re seeing usage all
overtheplace.”
Danielson says the library has
attracted users not only in the
Middle East, but across Asia,
from China to Siberia. “It’s stun-
ning,”shesays.
“We have some very dedicated
readersinSaudiArabia,whosend
uslittlenotes.”
Online research revealed the li-
braryevenhadthousandsoffans
on Facebook, despite not even
having a dedicated page on the
social-mediasiteatthetime.
“We’re starting a Facebook
page now and we’ll feature new
books,” she says. “By August, we
think we’ll have 4,000 or 5,000
books, and at that point we will
become a little bit more aggres-
siveaboutmarketing.”
There is huge interest in books
in the region, she adds – Arabs
have been readers since the 9th
century. “There’s a man in Cairo
who started an e-book business
and he said that the motivating
factorforwhathewastryingtodo
was to get publishers to release
theirbooksaselectronicbooks,”
shesays.
“He said what motivated him
was book sellers in Cairo saying
‘Wegetrequestsfromalloverthe
country, and very often, it costs
more to send the books than the
bookcosts’.
“People are ready for this, and I
know that one of the things that
a collection online does is it acts
as a preservation medium, be-
cause it has this very elaborate
back-endthatwillmigratedigital
files forward when they become
obsolete.”
ĝĝ halbustani@thenational.ae
The Dubai Digital
Library aims to
help preserve
Arab culture and
tradition. Hareth
Al Bustani finds
out about the
challenges it faces
03Tuesday, February 9, 2016 www.thenational.ae
The National arts&life
uae reads
Ancientandmodern
Arabic Collections
Online – New York
University
A mass digitisation project by
NYU and partner organisations,
which hopes to include 15,000
volumes within five years.
Qatar Digital Library
A partnership between the
Qatar Foundation, the Qatar
National Library and The British
Library, with more than 677,500
image entries.
Arabic and Middle
Eastern Electronic
Library – Yale
University Library
A digital collection of about
350,000 pages of text, indexed
and searchable in the language
of publication.
Arabic manuscripts –
Wellcome Library
Almost 500 volumes of manu-
scripts from the 10th to the 20th
century, covering medicine,
pharmacology, cosmology,
alchemy, cookery and more.
Islamic Heritage
Project – Harvard
University
More than 280 Islamic manu-
scripts, 50 maps and 275 pub-
lished texts from the university’s
library and museum collections.
*Hareth Al Bustani
other digital Arabic collections
A selection of Arabic-language books that have been digitised and can easily be accessed online. Photos courtesy NYU Abu Dhabi
