The Bibliotheca Alexandrina Participated in MELCom 36th Annual Conference

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina participated in the 36th Annual Conference of MELCom (Middle East Librarian Committee), held at Istanbul last May. The Conference brought together professionals in the fields of electronic resources and digitization programs; manuscripts, rare books and documents preservation and targeted developing Middle Eastern collections.

NovoVerus was introduced during the BA’s presentation at the conference as a reliable OCRing tool alongside the latest digitization techniques developed by the BA, comprising image processing and optical character recognition (OCR) for Arabic text digitization. NovoVerus OCR Software, was demonstrated in the discourse of illustrating the latest digitization endeavors pursued by the BA which involve the digitization of more than 800,000 Egyptian newspaper clippings that have been collected since 1976 by the Centre d’Études et de Documentation Économique, Juridiques et Sociales (CEDEJ).

Presenting NovoVerus came as a valuable contribution that was in line with the attendees’ fields of interest especially that it can handle global languages including Arabic, Pashto, Hebrew, Urdu, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, French and English, while maintaining high performance and accuracy even with damaged originals with low text quality.

MELCom International, the European Association of Middle East Librarians, is a non-governmental organization, devoted to promoting co-operation among individuals and institutions in Europe, the Middle East and throughout the world concerned with all aspects of (Middle East) librarianship, book collecting, the book trade and publishing.