Two thousand books from a wide variety of genres have gone online on ddl.ae, managed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation. Books on language, medicine, pharmacy, geography history, religion, sociology and biographies are part of the collection, a collaborative effort involving the public, who will be able to annotate and comment on sections of the books. Phase two of the library will also include images, scanned manuscripts and maps. The library is also working with universities to acquire newspapers, audiobooks and magazines.
The foundation also plans to make international acquisitions, and apply for rights for works translated into Arabic in other countries. Jamal bin Huwaireb, the managing director of the foundation, said, “I believe there are more than 2,000 Arabic books translated in Pakistan, India and Europe every year. We just need to secure the rights for DDL.”
Arabic literature has a long and hoary history, and the Arabic world served as an important conduit for the transfer of ideas between the western world and the east. Several important works were translated into Arabic in the past, from their Sanskrit, Chinese, Greek and Latin originals, and Baghdad and Moorish Spain were famous for their extensive libraries.
The foundation has plans to scan and digitize many of these ancient manuscripts. However, optical character recognition or OCR, the process by which softwares identify text from scanned images, is fairly limited in capability in Arabic. The New York University, Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) has been working on these challenges, and hasn’t made much headway. In nine years, they have managed to digitize just 2000 books. Virginia Danielson, director of NYUAD’s library explained why Arabic OCR is so difficult. “Because Arabic has three forms of each letter, it’s not as easy to train an OCR system to recognize words. You can get it to recognize individual words, but sometimes it can’t deal with a sentence syntax. According to Danielson, most OCR softwares can only manage forty percent accuracy in Arabic OCR. With extensive training, they can hit eighty five percent. This doesn’t take into consideration the challenges of properly scanning old manuscripts on faded paper with handwritten text. That adds to the complexity enormously.
The foundation’s current initiative is part of the President of UAE, His Highness Shaikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s, announcement that 2016 will be the Year of Reading. The UAE has already announced that a billion-dinar library will be coming up in Al Jaddaf, a locality in Dubai.
