Arabic-Language Digitization Planning

FAIN: PW-253861-17

Ithaka Harbors, Inc. (New York, NY 10006-1895)
John Kiplinger (Project Director: July 2016 to November 2019)

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.