Bibliotheca Alexandrina holds a Digitization Training workshop for the American University of Beirut
Alexandria, 10 June 2013 – Pursuing its mission in disseminating knowledge and sharing its expertise, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) hosted a group of five ICT and library information specialists from the American University of Beirut (AUB) for the workshop “Digitization – from Thoughts to Implementation”. The workshop was conducted by the ICT sector at the BA for five consecutive days from the 12 – 16 May on BA premises.
Trainees were introduced to the digitization practices of the BA and participated in sessions on digitization standards techniques, quality assurance in scanning, image processing and OCRing, with special emphasis on handling Arabic texts and different kinds of materials such as newspapers, photos and manuscripts among others. The training also included discussions regarding various advanced technologies applied in planning and management. Theoretical presentations and discussions were complemented with hands-on practical sessions. The practical aspect targeted forging the participants’ skills in handling on-the-job details and tweaks in order to maximize performance and quality.
In a parallel track, trainees were introduced to the infrastructure of the BA institutional repository (Digital Assets Repository – DAR), the BA’s online archiving system, the digital assets factory (DAF) and the digitization workflow developed by the BA, showcasing a variety of BA digital products including the largest Arabic digital library worldwide (comprising more than 185,000 Arabic books). The Arabic digital library comes in the framework of the BA digital book collection, which currently holds more than 300,000 books in five languages and associated with an efficient search facility and a multifunctional book viewer. That is in addition to the different digital library initiatives at the BA such as Memory of Modern Egypt and Wellcome Library Manuscript collection among others.
Known for its profound expertise in digitally preserving heritage, the BA has developed over the past ten years the reputation of being a pioneer in digital library practices, with distinction in practices of digitizing Arabic content, as the fruit of the research done in this domain during the past 10 years.
The workshop comes in accordance with the BA mission to offer technical support and training for researchers everywhere. In this framework, the ICT sector at the BA had delivered several training workshops on digitization during the past decade, among which; Digitizing Arabic Text workshop in 2007 in partnership with Yale University, training for Municipal Administration Modernization Syrian team in 2009 and the study tour for Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) in 2010. These workshops were held while ensuring the upgrading of material to showcase the latest state-of-the-art technologies pursued by the BA.
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