OACIS: A Joint Project Led by Yale University Aims to Create a Massive Collection of Middle Eastern Scholarly Journals
From the Article:
The first project, Online Access for Consolidated Information about Serials (OACIS), is a searchable list of catalogue information compiled from the 20 participating libraries around the world, including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) and that of the American University in Cairo. The OACIS list is composed entirely of catalogue data of scholarly journals from and about the Middle East.
“The catalogue records are information about the journals, they are not the stuff itself,” explains Ann Okerson, Yale’s associate university librarian for collections and international programs. “The ‘sexy’ word is ‘metadata’.”
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Okerson is also interested in working with the Egyptian National Library and Archives (ENLA) to bring its “stunning collection of books, manuscripts, journals, and others materials” into OACIS. This hasn’t been easy, as ENLA’s catalogue and those of other national libraries are not fully digitized.
“I would kill to get the National Library of Egypt’s and the National Library of Syria’s records into OACIS,” she says. “Well, no! I wouldn’t kill, but gosh, it would be so fabulous — Tunisia, Algeria, and so on.
“We’ve been talking to them and saying ‘when?’ And I think everyone’s willing, it’s just a matter of when will there be enough automation at those libraries to make it possible.”
Access to OACIS is freely available through the project website (www.library.yale.edu/oacis). The database can be searched in English, Arabic, French, Spanish and German.
“Anybody can access it,” Okerson explains, “but you need the internet connection, you need a computer, a fast connection that actually works. That’s a challenge in many [Middle Eastern] countries.”
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