The USEK Library is delighted to announce its cooperation with Moise Khayrallah Center in USA aimed at implementing the Arabic OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to the digital periodicals from the Latin American collection housed at the USEK Library. These periodicals were written in Arabic and published in Latin America by Lebanese immigrants, dating back to the 19th century, era of the great immigration wave, onwards.
This partnership is part of the arabicarchives.org project initiated by Khayrallah Center, which collects the early Arab immigrants’ archives that have left remarkable legacy in North and South America. These records were not accessible because they were dispersed and stored in disparate locations, and hence not digitally searchable. Consequently, the Center has created a completely searchable database of these publications by developing Arabic OCR technology to render the digitized images of these history pages into searchable text.
The objectives of this collaboration are to contribute to scholarly research, explore a heritage that spans years and tells the stories of Lebanese/Arab pioneers, and expand non-English content on the web.
Accordingly, our digital periodicals from the Latin American collection will be fully searchable, allowing users to easily search their content by keyword.
“We at USEK Library, entrusted with this legacy, are proud to join this remarkable initiative, to bring our treasures and efforts in support of the expertise of Khayrallah Center to achieve this worthy goal”, said Fr. Joseph Moukarzel, USEK Library Director.
“Joining this partnership allows us to share our collection with scholars, researchers and public worldwide, a step forward in keeping with our commitment to discoverability and to the growth of our renowned collections”, added Fr. Moukarzel.
“The Khayrallah Center is delighted and privileged to collaborate with USEK Library, one of the premiere archives in the world for Lebanese history. This partnership will add a treasure trove of periodicals to our Arabic database and give researchers and the general public unprecedented access to a wealth of historical literature about Lebanese migration to South America. We regard this as the first step in a very important partnership between NC State University and USEK." stated Dr. Akram Khater, Director of Moise Khayrallah Center.
To know more about the Latin American collection at the USEK Library, click here:
https://libguides.usek.edu.lb/latin-american-collection
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