Rare Middle Eastern and North African Works to be Digitized Through Federally-Funded Cultural Imaginings Project

Rare Middle Eastern and North African works will be made available online through a federally-funded project launched today by The George Washington University, Kirtas Technologies and Georgetown University. The state-of-the-art project, Cultural Imaginings: the Creation of the Arab World in the Western Mind, will evaluate automatic book digitization systems by electronically scanning selected the rare works. The project was made possible through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded to GW’s Gelman Library to evaluate digitizing technology made by Kirtas Technologies. As part of the evaluation process, Gelman Library, along with Georgetown’s Joseph Mark Lauinger Library, will digitize more than 2,500 books and items from special collections from both universities.  See the complete press release here.