Iraqi Recollection

Project background
The project aims to digitize a selected group of the most important scholarly humanistic Iraqi journals held by Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. The main objective of this project is to create an electronic archive of these digitized files, facilitating their retrieval and display via the Internet, and integrating the archive into other existing electronic systems, such as the search engine of OACIS. Scholars in Iraq and around the world will easily gain access to this important segment of Iraq’s printed heritage. The project also proposes to develop an approach and best practices for scanning Arabic and Middle-East language-based humanistic content, in order to facilitate access to scarcely held and disappearing materials from a key world region. The output of the project will be fed into the AMEEL database.

Agreement with Yale
BA was invited by Yale University to be a partner in this project. On 19 October 2006, BA and Yale University Library signed an agreement related to both AMEEL and the Iraqi Recollection projects. Both parties agreed on specific issues including digitization, integration, training, consulting, and following Open Source software standards.

BA's role
ISIS will be responsible through its Digital Laboratory for the digitization process. The Digital Laboratory will perform optical character recognition (OCR) on images scanned either at the BA or Yale. Moreover, a software engineer from ISIS will be assigned to work with/at Yale on project tasks relevant to integration, developing a presentation prototype, testing and evaluating all new systems developed, and/or evaluating vendor software. ISIS will also perform specific and defined technical tasks and consulting at cost for both AMEEL and Iraqi Recollection.