The proposed funds are for a meeting in Washington, DC to be held in November/December 2010 to identify and establish research priorities and to help construct a framework that will support and sustain collaboration among institutions working toward creating a digital library and related digital resources for North Africa. The project builds on the results of two earlier events: the "A Digital Library of the Middle East" workshop held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, January 15-17, 2006, and the January 25-29, 2007 "US-Maghreb Workshop on Digital Libraries for Education, Culture and Science" held in Rabat, Morocco. Both of these activities were funded in part by NSF. The proposed meeting will stimulate dialog and provide information that can improve efforts toward creating a new generation of digital resources for the Maghreb region of North Africa enabled by advanced computing and networking capabilities. Findings from the meetings are expected to inform grant-making agencies, private foundations and potential funders in other countries of new opportunities for research and infrastructure building efforts to broaden and sustain scientific collaboration with the research communities in Maghreb countries. This project is jointly funded by the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems and the Office of International Science and Engineering.
Scientists and researchers in the USA have excellent access to online sources of information, such as scientific publications, articles and data on experiments, including images. We also have the means to disseminate our ideas. Students and professional colleagues in Africa do not have these capabilities, and this makes it hard to collaborate, and researchers on both sides lose out on opportunities to expand knowledge and understanding. The Fulbright Academy of Science & Technology is a global organization based in the USA that seeks to build ties among scientists. We are a catalyst for progress. In 2007, we organized a multi-day conference in Rabat, Morocco to discuss this problem and how institutions in the US and in North Africa might work together to improve information access in North Africa. It was funded by NSF, UNESCO and the Moroccan government, and had about 100 participants, After our 2007 meeting, several groups began follow-up activities, and one result was a $1.5 million initiative funded by the US Department of State. A regional digital library for Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia will to increase their access to the latest international research, give scientists greater opportunities to collaborate and hopefully bolster their scientific work and scholarly publishing. In 2010, the Fulbright Academy was awarded a second NSF grant of to facilitate further discussion, planning and action toward full implementation of digital libraries and archives in North Africa. The workshop was in the Washington, DC on January 24-25, 2011. We had 62 participants from 8 countries plus 18 US states. Many participants were unaware of the vasy array of work being done in the US, in Europe and in North Africa on digital archives, and so much of the workshop time was spent on information sharing. The workshop planning committee was also interested in concrete outcomes. For example, we discussed our role (as individuals and as institutions) in a proposed International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives. Several participants volunteered to serve on the ICADLA steering committee, and the Moroccan delegation offered to host the subsequent ICADLA. Several institutions offered their services to institutions represented at the workshop (for example, the Internet Archive is creating a special archive relating to Fulbright scholars). The Library of Congress talked about creating an international fellows program, and several universities discussed professonal exchanges. Because the meeting was in Washington, we also had a behind-the-scenes tour at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and a program at George Washington University's Digitization lab in the GW Library. Because we had been careful with our funding, several thousand dollars remained after the conclusion of the workshop. These funds were used to sponsor a small follow-up meeting in Heidelberg, Germany, in March 2011. This allowed us to receive feedback from several individuals who had been unable to come in January. We discussed the January outcomes, and the March meeting participants shared their suggestions for future collaboration. The Workshop Participants: US participants came from 11 US federal agencies, 14 US universities, and several key institutions, such as the Internet Archive. The Federal entities were US Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Library of Medicine, National Science Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, US Agency for International Development, US Department of Agriculture, US Department of Energy, US Department of State, US Institute for Museum & Library Services, and US National Archives. About 25% of the participants were international, coming from organizations such as the UN, UNESCO, eifl-Electronic Information for Libraries, Morocco’s Ministry of Higher Education and their National Institute of Hygiene, two leading research institutes in Tunisia, University of Nouakchott in Mauritania and the Université M'Hamed Bougara Boumerdes in Algeria. About 30% of the participants were alumni of the Fulbright Exchange Program.
