A
project to investigate digitization and OCR methods for Arabic-language print
materials, in order to develop workflows and digitization guidelines for
Arabic-language scholarly journals. As a prototype, the project will digitize
issues of the journal Al-Abhath, a quarterly publication of the American
University of Beirut.
JSTOR is seeking a Humanities Collections and Reference
Resources Foundations grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to
support research on the high-quality digitization and digital preservation of
Arabic-language scholarly journals. The proposed research will include the
development of digitization and indexing guidelines for Arabic-language
scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences, and the digitization
of a small test run of Arabic-language scholarly journal issues. An important
consideration in this process will be how to digitize Arabic-language texts
with optical character recognition (OCR) of sufficient quality that the content
can be made available for full-text searching and crawling by search engines—key
prerequisites for making scholarly texts fully discoverable online. The final
project deliverable will be a freely available white paper documenting the
lessons learned from our investigation.