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By Patricia Sleeman 　http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2011/05/03/the-house-of-booksdar-el-kataub-part-1/

Newspapers in National Library of Jordan

Baghdad, 2003 -  when Domenico Chirico, Director of Un Ponte Per… first asked various organisations for support and resources for the reconstruction of the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA) destroyed during the Iraq invasion and occupation, he was met with cries of bemusement and disbelief:

‘Why worry about books and archives when we have lives to save?!’.

Some if not many  struggled to understand that a library in Baghdad could be a priority during such horrific times.  But they had not yet met Dr Saad Eskander, Director of the INLA…but that is another story which has been told.

Cairo,  2011 and the ‘Spring revolution’ is happening in the Middle East.  In Egypt almost as soon as unrest broke out, two public libraries in Cairo were  burnt to the ground however cheeringly in Alexandria, news came of staff and citizens forming a human chain around the Biblioteca Alexandrina (much supported by Susan Mubarack) and another around the National Mususem of Egypt to protect it, though it wasn’t so lucky. These stories as told via Twitter cited what had happened in Iraq. Iraq, sadly is not alone in having suffered such destruction to its cultural property. These attacks,  fire, pillage, looting to order and just plain old theft  do more than just destroy a building or some documents. They are attacks on civil society, denying Iraqi people  access to engage in democracy, to access information as well as to their cultural memory.

Amman, 2011 – In light of all this, it was with great interest that I agreed to participate in the ‘The House of Books/ Dar El Kataub’ workshop run by the aforementioned Domenico Chirico’s NGO UPP and UNESCO.   Its purpose was to work on challenges facing the digitisation of Arabic texts.  I was there to look at the preservation aspect of digitisation, a shock to some as it is often thought that digitisation is itself a preservation strategy! So there was work to be done…

William Kopycki and I leading a session

We had a wide range of people from Iraq, Lebanon, Qatar/Australia, Jordan, Egypt/USA, Italy and the United Kingdom.  From an digital archivist’s point of view (and in my view the right one),  the projects represented presented us with the gamut of activities which are now present in a digital library or archive, from the development of impressives copyright legisalation in Jordan to a start to finish overview of a project digitsing  journals relating to the 19th centroy arab cultural renaissance Al-Nahda. We also heard about training and devloping infrastructures for digital object management in Iraq, as well as an overview of the current project in the INLA to reconstitute many of its collections through digitisation. We had a good deal of course about preservation from myself and Giovanni Bergamin from the University of Florence and Maurizio Messina.

My work consisted partly of leading the group in a consolidation of ideas discussed during day one.  A very important goal of this workshop is collaboration and as a result we wanted the group to think individually and in groups of four about why they saw the need to collaborate and then to tell us how they would approach collaboration.  We ended up with great points which reinforced the absolute need for collaboration in terms of standardisation, best practise, resource discovery, lobbying and important networking opportunities across the arab speaking world.

I also was there to speak and work with the group a lot about digital preservation and digitisation. This is an area which can be neglected often as many considered digitisation to be simply about simply delivering access to materials.  In addition these digital objects are considered digital surrogates and little consideration is given to their preservation as the analogue copies are available. It is important to consider preservation of these digital surrogates over time at the point of their creation.  Do we really want to invest the time and money again in their re-digitisation? I very much doubt it! However unless consideration is given to their long term sustainability this is what will happen, data loss or re-digitisation. This is time and money few of course can afford to spend.

Touching of some of the issues we covered in terms of preservation we looked at planning digitisation projects in light of preservation and their sustainability and explored the main points to consider for preservation of digitised content, drawing a lot from our very popular report on digitisation and preservation produced by DPC/ULCC and PORTICO. I reinforced the real need for honest sharing and for sharing failures as well as successes, we have all had them so we can only progress through acknowledgement of both.

Looking at the 1923 magazine on women’s issues called  Layla, we explored in a session what characteristics we would like to preserve over time.  Many things which we assume will be kept in the paper based world, have to planned for in detail  in the digital world, not much if anything can be left to chance.

Workshop over!

All speakers were extremely interesting individually and collectively as they gave an outsider like me the overview of the digital library/archives world in this part of the Middle East.  Qaiss Hatef  Saeed of the INLA spoke about the motivation of the INLA to establish a digital library  due to the loss of their holdings in the library during and post conflict.  Much of the library is being rebuilt literally from ashes by means of digital content,  and popular holdings need to be digitised to give as Quaiss said ‘ books a rest’ from handling.

Qaiss also proposed that in 100 years hard copy books will no longer exist and everything will be digital. Fighting talk! But  digital libraries however will only survive as long as we invest in their sustainability.  Digital resources have great power in terms of access but they are also very vulneable in terms of long term sustainabilty.  As such action needs to be taken an now to stop bit rot and technology obsolesence being the next threat to access to information which is now increasingly digital.

*Note: The House of Books workshop was picked up by 16  newspapers in Jordan and Iraq. These include  articles in the Baghdad press, The Jordan Times and even the Iraq National Congress.