Intellectual Property and International Collaboration in the Digital Humanities: the Moroccan Jewish Community Archives

FAIN: HD-51100-10

Lewis and Clark College (Portland, OR 97219-8091)
Oren Kosansky (Project Director: March 2010 to April 2014)

The development of a pilot website that provides interactive access to a translated, annotated, and searchable set of 50 to 75 documents of 19th and 20th century Moroccan Jewish materials.The project also will seek to create protocols and best practices for intellectual property issues for digital archival projects in developing countries.

This project will develop novel ways of conceptualizing and implementing interactive digital humanities in international and multilingual environments. Using an archive of rare 19th and 20th century Moroccan Jewish documents, the project will result in a prototype for dealing with intellectual property (IP) rights as they exist at the intersection between U.S. and international contexts. Working with Moroccan stake-holders, we will adapt current best practices in IP assessment and licensing to develop protocols for projects in developing countries. We will also design a collaborative model that involves international scholars and local community members at all stages of digital archive development. The project will result in a pilot website that provides interactive access to a translated, annotated, and searchable set of 50 to 75 documents. The digital archive will be a valuable resource to researchers working in Near Eastern studies, Linguistics, and Jewish studies.