This project supports a U.S.-Egypt Workshop on the Digital Information Infrastructure in the Middle East and Application to Digital Libraries and Cultural Heritage, to be held in January 2006 in Alexandria, Egypt. The organizers are Dr. Joyce Ray, Associate Deputy Director for Library Services at the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in Washington, DC and Dr. Noha Adly, Information and Communication Director at the Bibliotheca Alexanderina, Alexandria, Egypt. The workshop will involve representatives from the U.S. and Egypt, and participants from other Middle Eastern countries. The workshop has two distinct but related objectives, to elucidate the requirements and mechanisms for building regional information networks and infrastructure, and to develop plans for a Digital Library of the Middle East whose content will focus on the cultural heritage of the Middle East. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a leader in promoting cultural heritage research, will host the workshop as part of its role as an information and research center, demonstrating the importance and utility that information technologies play in building and preserving digital cultural heritage assets.
The NSF has in the past decade sponsored numerous activities to strengthen Internet connections among U.S. Research and Education Networks (RENs) and their counterpart RENs in many parts of the world. To date, however, efforts to build such links to the Middle East and Africa have lagged behind. This project brings together countries in the Middle East to compare and formulate strategies for developing national and regional RENs. The workshop will not only help to strengthen collaborative links between U.S. and Middle Eastern scientists working in the cultural heritage disciplines, but will also lay the groundwork for regional and national RENs that will enable a wide range of collaborations between Middle Eastern and U.S. researchers in many science and engineering disciplines. Finally, the outcomes of the workshop should strengthen the position of Middle Eastern researchers in the global mainstream of scientific communication, which now includes sharing of massive amounts of digital content.
Rapid advances in technology make it now feasible to create extremely accurate digital facsimiles of a wide variety of cultural heritage materials that capture and in many cases increase the scholarly value of the originals while creating unlimited possibilities for shared use. The workshop will identify and promote new opportunities to collect, organize, and make available through digital technologies materials related to the cultural heritage of a region of almost unparalleled cultural and archaeological riches. The Middle East includes the ancient land of Mesopotamia where some of mankind's great civilizations began, the lands where three major religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, emerged, and the lands where the first written language, cunieform, appeared about 4500 years ago. The value of cultural artifacts has long been recognized with the unfortunate consequence that important objects and parts of archaeological sites have been transported to different locations around the world. Piecing back together the history of the Middle East will involve the efforts of an international cadre of scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including historians, physical and cultural anthropologists, archeologist and other domain experts working with computer scientists, digital library experts and curators. Bringing together such diverse communities can build new intellectual programs of research and scholarship in the Middle East as well as in the U.S.
This project is being supported under the U.S.-Egypt Joint Fund Program, which provides grants to scientists and engineers in both countries to carry out these joint scientific activities. Additional funds have been provided by the Office of International Science and Engineering to ensure that the workshop will have wide participation from Middle East countries.
