Tag Archives: digitisation

The House of Books: Manuscripts and religious identity in Iraq

Father Najeeb Michaeel is an Iraqi Christian priest who speaks Arabic, English, French, Aramaic and Syriac, not to mention being able to read Latin and Greek. In the garden of Zaytun library, Erbil I hear this gentle man tell me how his community of friars used to live in Mosul, a traditional centre for Christianity [...]

The House of Books: Erbil, Iraq

“What you destroy, we will rebuild, only better” – Slogan of Kurdish Peshmerga. The garden I am standing in is so beautiful that I find it difficult to imagine that it was a former detention centre  operated by Saddam Hussain’s Ba’ath party, a place  of imprisonment and torture.  It is now a garden full of  [...]

Scanning is different from digitisation

If you haven’t seen it, can I recommend Kristen Snawder’s recent post on the Library of Congress Digital Preservation blog, Digitization is different than digital preservation. Kristen reiterates familiar points about the long-term commitment necessary for serious digital preservation, contrasted with the quick hit of a scanning project. “In the hurry to meet user expectations, [...]

House of Books Part 2: OCR and Arabic texts

‘Machine replication of human functions, like reading, is an ancient dream’ * One of the many topics discussed in the House of Books project in Amman was the issue of OCR and Arabic texts. Optical character recognition or OCR has become one of the most successful applications of technology in the field of pattern recognition [...]

Synergies abound

Some days it all seems worthwhile and last Friday was such a day. I spent most of it at SOAS listening to accounts of the many digitisation projects of the Centre for Digital Africa, Asia and the Middle East (CeDAAME), including the Fürer-Haimendorf photographic collection, Islamic manuscripts (in partnership with Yale) and other justly named [...]