Washington, DC, May 22, 2017—The Whiting Foundation has awarded the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) $170,000 to design, implement, and launch a prototype Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME). CLIR will work closely with its primary organizational partner on the DLME, The Antiquities Coalition, and with five universities to create a proof of concept for an interoperable, large-scale digital library of cultural artifacts from the Middle East and North Africa. Stanford University Libraries and its IT department will be the principal technical partners on building the prototype.

Along with the horrific loss of life and human suffering in the region, the cultural heritage of many nations in the Middle East and North Africa is under severe threat from destruction, looting, illegal trafficking, and terrorism. The DLME aims to help remediate this crisis by creating a globally available resource in partnership with collaborators throughout the region that provides detailed descriptions and images of artifacts, along with information about the objects’ history, ownership, and legal status.

The prototype, which focuses on collections held in the United States, is a first step in developing a technical platform that can be used to aggregate collections globally. Some 100,000 objects, including text, video, photographs, archives, manuscripts, and maps illuminating the history of the Middle East and North Africa, will be included in the proof of concept. It will leverage many of the open source tools that have been developed and tested over the last decade through the open source digital library community. The prototype will be available in English and Arabic; the DLME is currently engaging with and preparing partnerships at museums and other cultural institutions throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

“The Whiting Foundation grant is pivotal to the DLME project,” said CLIR president Charles Henry, a principal investigator on the grant. “It provides the support for our technical proof of concept, without which the project could not advance. The work funded by the Foundation will allow us to shape and define the future elements of the DLME and is thus essential to the success of this extraordinary, international effort of cultural cohesion.”

In addition to the technical effort, the project will create three exhibitions based on the DLME. Each will be devised for specific audiences, such as scholars, K-12 students, and the engaged public, to create user cases and test functionality.

“The DLME will offer an interactive suite of sophisticated content, applications, and tools that responds to human curiosity, whether by a high school student in New Jersey, a college student in Jordan, or a scholar at one of the world’s great universities,” said Peter Herdrich, co-founder of The Antiquities Coalition and a principal investigator on the grant project. “This is a solution that will make a difference in many ways.”

“The world needs a Digital Library of the Middle East to break down the barriers separating digital repositories and make this rich heritage easier to discover and explore,” said Daniel Reid, executive director of The Whiting Foundation. “This ambitious international project promises to bring cultural treasures housed at museums and libraries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia back to the people of the region where they were forged, and to guide students and scholars from around the globe to the institutions in the Middle East that safeguard its history and culture. The Whiting Foundation is proud to support such an important effort in its early stages.”

Initial partners include Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.

CLIR expects to launch the prototype by the end of 2017.

For more information on the DLME, visit https://www.clir.org/initiatives-partnerships/DLME.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.

The Antiquities Coalition is leading the global fight against cultural racketeering: the illicit trade in antiquities by organized criminals and terrorist organizations. The Coalition’s innovative and practical solutions tackle crimes against heritage head on, empowering communities and countries in crisis.

The Whiting Foundation supports literature and the humanities. We believe that it is imperative that the collective treasures of history and memory be passed on to the future with as little loss as we can manage. Recognizing that irreplaceable cultural heritage is being destroyed at an alarming rate around the globe, we are committed to supporting local stewards of human culture around the globe as part of this shared endeavor.

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“This partnership marks a new direction for CLIR; we are excited and eager to work together,” said CLIR President Charles Henry. “Axiell’s long experience in the Middle East, its knowledge in service to preserving cultural heritage, and innovative technology solutions for collection management and education make it a compelling collaborator. At heart, Axiell’s mission is to facilitate a humanistic enrichment of our capacity for understanding our world and our astonishingly rich cultural heritage, consonant with the vision of CLIR and the DLME.”

As presently conceived, the DLME will combine digital inventories with high-resolution digital replicas of cultural artifacts originating from the Middle East, including artifacts managed by cultural organizations in the region as well as digitized items relevant to Middle Eastern cultural heritage maintained around the world. In addition, large-scale digitization and cataloging of museum, library, and archival physical objects—as well as artifacts from archeological sites—will be supported throughout the Middle East to enrich the scope of cultural materials online. Images and descriptions from the DLME will be made publicly available, to the extent permitted by copyright, to encourage greater understanding of the region’s cultural legacy.

The project aims to be sustainable and to provide a cultural commonwealth, while helping safeguard a fundamentally important expression of our humanity. Making the inventory available and creating a teaching resource would further open it up for advanced research in the region. Through its high-resolution images and detailed descriptions of ownership and legal status, this multimedia digital library will be designed to trace the provenance and track the movement of historically significant items as a means to inhibit looting and illicit trafficking.

Axiell has ongoing contracts with cultural institutions in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, comprising a significant part of the broader region that the partners working on the DLME aspire to cover. These would form a solid basis for the inventory alongside Axiell’s other worldwide customers with artifacts from the region.

Commenting on the collaboration, Axiell Group President & CEO Joel Sommerfeldt said, “Axiell is proud and honored to be invited to collaborate with the Council on Library and Information Resources. Our organizations have a common view of how important it is to preserve and share the world’s history, to the benefit of research and cross-cultural collaboration. We are glad to be able to contribute with our knowledge of how to manage data, enrich collections and make them more accessible in a digital age. In our collaboration with CLIR, we will help support and guide in the development of the Digital Library of the Middle East.“

About CLIR

CLIR is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning. Through its programs, which include the Digital Library Federation and Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives, CLIR aims to promote forward-looking collaborative solutions that transcend disciplinary, institutional, professional, and geographic boundaries in support of the public good. To learn more, visit http://www.clir.org/.

About Axiell

Axiell serves libraries, schools, archives, museums and authorities with technically advanced and innovative solutions developed in close cooperation with its customers. More than 3,000 library organizations with thousands of branches use an Axiell library management system and Axiell Arena, a tool for the virtual library. The systems for archives, libraries, and museums are used by over 3,400 cultural institutions over the world. In addition, more than 3,000 schools use an Axiell system. The Axiell Group, headquartered in Lund, has more than 300 employees based out of 24 offices in Sweden, Australia, Abu Dhabi, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA. Together, the Axiell Group forms one of the world’s largest companies in these sectors. To find out more about Axiell and its products, please visit http://www.axiell.com/.

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