**American Institute of Yemeni Studies**

### Local Libraries and Archives

A significant category of unmet critical need for successful
international research is access to local library and archival resources
in target countries. To face this global need directly, we propose to
conduct full-fledged, on-the-ground surveys in world areas important to
American scholars and students, using teams of knowledgeable scholars
and librarians, following formalized protocols and standardized
methodologies. Obtaining access to foreign collections entails
substantial work, and requires extensive knowledge of local cultural and
political conditions, experience in working with local institutions and
research resources, ready access to research clearance, and very broad
networks and connections among academic institutions, libraries,
museums, research institutes, education ministries, non-governmental
organizations, and the local scholarly communities. In many countries of
the world this kind of local access is available through the American
Overseas Research Centers (AORCs).

The primary mission of all AORCs is a long-term commitment to the
maintenance, improvement, and expansion of overseas research collections
in all formats and media, and the augmentation of their capabilities to
serve area studies.

The American Institute of Yemeni Studies, in conjunction with
collaborating organizations in the various countries hosting AORCs, is
proposing a four-year project to improve access to the most important of
the critical and endangered local archival and special collections
through a systematic program of surveys of local libraries and archives,
a scaled and prioritized approach to item-level cataloging of unique
materials, selective preservation, and, where the scholarly need for the
newly discovered resources is found to be greatest, selective
digitization and dissemination via the infrastructure of the Digital
Library for International Research (DLIR).

Participating AORCs are located in West Africa; the Mediterranean basin;
the Middle East and North Africa; South, Southeast, and Inner Asia; and
Latin America.

**Center For Research Libraries**

### TICFIA South Asia Project

The Center for Research Libraries proposes a four-year collaborative
project to improve access to vital resources on South Asia for scholars,
public officials, business leaders and other citizens through the
creation of digital resources delivered via the World Wide Web. The
proposal encompasses all seven authorized activities enumerated in the
statute authorizing the Technological Innovation and Cooperation for
Foreign Information Access (TICFIA) program.

**Need and Significance**

This project will address significant needs described by national
foundations and associations to provide a wide variety of users with
reliable bibliographic and holdings information for publications from
South Asia. It will also address priorities for the Center for South
Asia Libraries recommended unanimously by scholars and librarians at the
Center\'s 2003 planning meeting. Along with holdings information,
important periodical literature unavailable in this country will be
identified, preserved and made accessible. In addition, this project
will meet the need for resources for instruction in the less commonly
taught languages of South Asia that both scholars and public officials
have cited as a particular need.

**Project Design and Activities**

Building upon the foundation and experience of three previous digital
initiatives, the proposed project, named TICFIA South Asia, will make
new contributions to scholarship with four specific services: (1)
reliable bibliographic and holdings information for South Asian
materials not located within the United States by means of a South Asian
Union Catalogue; (2) resources for instruction in less commonly taught
languages by digital conversion and delivery via the Internet of records
that comprise a hitherto under-used facet of the invaluable Linguistic
Survey of India; (3) preservation through microfilm and bibliographic
access through indexing for highly select periodicals published in South
Asia; and (4) development of electronic article delivery on demand, from
the South Asian subcontinent to readers in the United States.

**Personnel, Resources, Management, and Evaluation**

In order to implement the program outlined above, TICFIA South Asia will
create an infrastructure that draws upon the experience and cooperative
relationships established in other projects. The extensive experience of
the Center for Research Libraries and the University of Chicago in the
implementation of global projects will be made available to the project
through the principal investigator, co-directors, and project manager.
They have extensive experience in projects of this kind and have
established close relationships with collaborating institutions in South
Asia and Europe, including the British Library, the Roja Muthiah
Research Library, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta,
and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies in Islamabad, among
others. The project will continue to draw upon the technical expertise
of the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the
French Language (ARTFL) at the University of Chicago and the University
of Chicago Library that has helped to make the Digital South Asia
Library a prominent source of South Asian information on the Internet.
In its evaluation, the project will meet and collaborate with other
projects in an effort to improve and refine the production of digital
resources.

**Florida International University**

**Digital Library of the Caribbean**

In order to preserve and increase access to valuable resources for the
study of the Caribbean and the advancement of Caribbean Studies, the
Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University,
in consortium with the University of Central Florida, University of
Florida, the University of Miami, and the University of the Virgin
Islands, proposes a multifaceted and collaborative international digital
library project. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) intends to
cross borders and build collaboration among diverse institutions to
share resources in a common space, thus expanding the range of Caribbean
materials available to scholars, students and citizens through enhanced
electronic access in multilingual interfaces.

The Caribbean comprises a diverse mix of cultures, histories and peoples
that share a common space. This region illustrates trends in migration
and nation-state building that are currently taking place on a world
scale, and is thus a significant focus of study for scholars and
students alike. Pan-Caribbean research will provide scholars, leaders,
and citizens with the resources necessary to build an understanding of
issues central to our lives today and to construct effective current
policies and sound strategies for the future.

This digital library will comprise collections that examine the
similarities and differences in histories, cultures, languages and
governmental systems. The dLOC will be an umbrella for digital projects
and collections from and about the Caribbean that might exist in
isolation at a single institution, thus providing a critical mass of
resources in a single space that will foster a fuller interdisciplinary
understanding.

Building upon the success of a cooperative pilot project and the
progress made at the first dLOC Planning Meeting in July 2004 at the
University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, this project proposes to use
federal funds to meet the following goals:

-   Increase access to Caribbean research resources by digitizing and
    making available through centralized searching collections of note,
    in English, French, and Spanish, including from the Archives
    Nationales d'Haiti, Caribbean Community (CARICOM), Fundación Global
    Desarrollo y Democracia (Dominican Republic), National Library of
    Jamaica, and Universidad de Oriente (Venezuela);

-   Build capacity by developing a multi-layered and comprehensive
    digitization training program for international partners;

-   Advance Caribbean studies by building an aggressive and engaging
    outreach program that delivers these collections to scholars, to the
    classroom, and to the general public;

-   Cultivate the development of new research initiatives among
    Caribbean scholars by providing a supportive framework to
    disseminate this work; and

-   Ensure sustainability of the dLOC by consolidating the
    organizational framework, both in governance and technical
    infrastructure.

**Indiana University**

**Central American and Mexican Video Archive**

Since 1960, millions of rural people in Central America and Mexico have
undergone radical transformations in their livelihoods and their
culture. The spectacular growth of agroexport economies caused a
significant ecological, social and cultural transformation of rural
communities. Land loss and internal migration directly conditioned the
development of social movements that, following a period of repression,
led to civil wars that ripped apart the fabric of Central American rural
societies, accelerating the pace of ecological and cultural change.
Although many documents have been produced dealing with the conflicts in
the 1980s, the crucially significant changes in peoples' lives have left
relatively little documentary trace. Similarly, the linguistic and
cultural transformations of the indigenous peoples of Mexico have not
been documented adequately. Since millions of migrants from the
Mesoamerican countryside moved recently to the United States, it is of
vital national interest to achieve a high level of understanding of
their cultural history. Before the rapidly deteriorating film and video
archives of this vital region are irreversibly destroyed, Indiana
University (IU) proposes to lead a collaborative project to create a
digital record available to researchers, teachers, and students via the
World Wide Web.

At Indiana University, the Central American and Mexican Video Archive
(CAMVA) is

sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
(CLACS), the Center for the Study of History and Memory (CSHM), and the
Digital Library Project/University Libraries (DLP). Based at IU, Project
CAMVA is a consortium of three leading research institutes in Central
America and Mexico: the Institute of Nicaraguan and Central American
History (IHNCA, Nicaragua), the Museum of Words and Images (MUPI, El
Salvador), and the Center for Advanced Research and Studies in Social
Anthropology (CIESAS, Mexico). The CAMVA project aims to accomplish the
following:

-   To create an audio-video digital archive from ethnographic and
    documentary recordings stored at physical archives in Mexico, El
    Salvador, and Nicaragua with other countries incorporated in
    subsequent phases;

-   To make this archive fully searchable and available to networked
    libraries for research and instruction; and

-   To contribute to methodological development in digitizing, coding,
    and accessing audiovisual data, including the provision of
    searchable and retrievable interface, available over the Web using
    bandwidth capability of Internet2.

In the first phase of CAMVA, physical archives will be assessed through
analysis by

researchers at IU and our partner institutions. The second phase will
convert the deteriorating audiovisual materials into a sustainable
digital format. Preparation for content delivery will take place at IU
with the participation of archivists from the partner institutions. When
these archivists return home, they will continue digitizing and
cataloguing in their respective countries.

The final phase of Project CAMVA will focus on access to the digital
video recordings and compiled bibliographic data created in earlier
phases.

**Michigan State University**

**Diversity and Tolerance in the Islam of West Africa**

One of the most critical educational needs for national security and
world peace in this era is almost unquestionably the need for
cross-cultural co-existence, understanding, and democracy. We stand at a
juncture of increasing polarization between some Muslim communities and
"the West." Acts of violence led by radical groups claiming to speak for
all of Islam have magnified the worldwide perception of the size and
following of these groups and their ideas. Models of religious
co-existence, diversity, tolerance and non-violence in the world are
essential to breaching this chasm, and educational resources must go
beyond the conflict of Middle East politics to examine "the lived
experiences of Muslim communities around the world." The Islam of West
Africa is one of these essential experiences to study and teach.

*Diversity and Tolerance in the Islam of West Africa* will make
accessible a wide array of currently unavailable materials from and
about the countries of Senegal and Ghana, their Muslim communities, and
the relations of those communities with the practitioners of other
faiths. Building on the innovative, cutting-edge technology of the
African Online Digital Library (AODL) developed through National Science
Foundation funding, this project will create digital copies of
unavailable or hard-to-access materials from archives and African
researchers in Senegal and Ghana, preserve them in a digital repository
in the United States, and develop Web-based public and educational
resources in thematic galleries geared towards a broad range of
international, historical and area studies. Resources and interactive
galleries produced by this project will present the tolerance and
diversity of religious practice in Senegal and Ghana, for students,
teachers, and the general public throughout the United States, as well
as West Africa and the world. The project will bring to light the
dominant tradition of incorporation, pragmatism, and mutual respect that
has marked many Islamic societies.

The overarching project goals are to:

-   Increase availability of information about diversity of Muslim
    practices generally and Ghanaian and Senegalese societies in
    particular;

-   Increase knowledge about Ghanaian and Senegalese religious,
    political, and cultural history; and

-   Increase research in Ghanaian and Senegalese religious, political
    and cultural history.

This will be accomplished in part through a team of experts in the study
of West Africa working together to identify the critical materials
unavailable in the United States, copy them, preserve them in the AODL
repository, and make them available and accessible to the public through
curated and framed "galleries" of materials focused on important
selected themes for Senegal and Ghana.

**Northern Illinois University**

**The Southeast Asia Digital Library**

Northern Illinois University Libraries, along with a consortium of
United States institutions and international partners propose the
creation of the Southeast Asia Digital Library. The digital library will
provide access to research materials, bibliographic indexes, and support
a wide range of research and teaching activities. To enhance
interoperability between area studies digital libraries, the project is
based on the model established by the Digital South Asia Library. It
will employ standards developed and approved by American and
international library organizations to provide free access to archives
of textual, still image, sound, and video resources, covering both
historical and current information from the region.

Nine constituent projects will create content and provide services for
the digital library. Projects include providing access to bibliographic
indexing; delivery of full-text articles in Thai; digitization of Thai
manuscripts, early printing in the languages of the region, and
photographs and archives in Cambodia and the Philippines; and digitally
archiving television programming from Indonesia and videos of interviews
from East Timor. Acting in concert with partners in the region,
individuals representing leading Southeast Asian Studies programs at
American universities will coordinate these projects. This effort will
enable these programs to use available resources more efficiently by
establishing a cooperative digital library rather than constructing
unconnected pieces.

The digital library will amass substantial resources from Southeast Asia
and provide free access for students, teachers, scholars, government
officials, and others with interest in the region.

**Yale University**

**An Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library**

Middle Eastern library content, particularly Arabic and other non-Roman
language materials, poses special challenges to the creation of digital
libraries. The Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library (AMEEL)
seeks to lay the foundations for future progress and to build a working
library by a two-fold strategy:

1\. To create a prototype Web-based portal for study of the Middle East,
including its history, culture, development, and contemporary face, and
to integrate existing scholarly digital content with this portal to make
such material easier to find and use efficiently and freely.

2\. To develop an environment for creating new digital resources, as
well as integrating existing resources into a common structure. We will
also tackle in particular the challenges of digitization and the
opportunities for technologically assisted interlibrary borrowing and
lending.

Project AMEEL will move rapidly on the underlying structural and
integration component of the project, create a resource useful in its
own right, and establish an architecture and standards for all scholars
who wish to participate in this project, thus enabling others to add
their resources and energy. The first stage of AMEEL will establish an
\'integration infrastructure\', both to create a useful resource rapidly
and to put in place an architecture for future development. AMEEL will
then work with partners to develop international standards for
digitization of Arabic-language materials and to support digital
information in Arabic. Finally, AMEEL will conduct a pilot Interlibrary
Loan project with a small number of libraries in the United States,
Europe, and particularly the Middle East, to prove the viability of the
physical exchange of materials or technically facilitated
representations of those materials (faxes, photocopies, photographs)
where digitization has not yet occurred.

A successful project will offer both a working library for United States
and international scholars and at the same time will make a major
contribution by encouraging multiple projects that create new resources
or integrate existing ones into the Web-based architecture we develop.

###### University of New Mexico

###### Harvester for Creating Knowledge Streams in the Americas 

### 

The University of New Mexico (UNM) Harvester for Creating Knowledge
Streams in the Americas addresses the digital divide that currently
marks a scientific barrier between North and South America by forming a
knowledge community supported by multi-disciplinary Latin America
content based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol. The Latin
American subcontinent is critical for the themes and technology methods
addressed in this proposal. The UNM harvester will archive and
disseminate Latin American collections in social medicine/ public
health, current news reports, historical collections covering social
history and political independence, K-12 teaching materials, PhD theses,
and pre-print working paper scholarship.

The project supports and trains content providers to establish OAI
repositories for open access to their collections. The UNM harvester
software gathers indexed materials and abstracts and directs users to
full-text repositories of previously unavailable content from
collaborating institutions in Latin America in three major languages:
English, Spanish and Portuguese. The harvester is supported by UNM
University Libraries, the Latin American Social Medicine project of the
Health Sciences Library and Informatics Center, the Consortium of the
Americas for Interdisciplinary Sciences, and the Latin American &
Iberian Institute and its Ibero-American Science and Technology
Consortium, Latin America Data Base, and Resources for Teaching About
the Americas. UNM Latin American partners in this project are three
major universities: the Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico);
Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil); and Universidad Simón
Bolívar (Venezuela).

**University of Virginia**

**The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library**

# The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital Library (THDL) and Tibetan and Himalayan Information Community (THIC) together constitute an innovative initiative utilizing technology to transform how scholars and educational institutions cooperate in the generation, processing, organization, and dissemination of knowledge about cultural regions of the world. It is building the world\'s preeminent online archive and communication hub for research and documentation in Tibetan and Himalayan Studies. Using the most recent in Web-based technology, much of which is being specifically designed for these purposes at the University of Virginia (UVA) and Cornell University, we are building a collaborative infrastructure for the remote networked management of a wide array of projects to generate and disseminate knowledge about the Tibetan and Himalayan cultural region from multiple disciplinary perspectives. The digital library initiative provides an overarching publishing and archiving arena for multiple institutions and projects that it seamlessly integrates with standard interfaces, tools, and classification systems. The information community initiative complements this by promoting communication, communal standards and tools, and interoperability among projects that are currently entirely distinct from each other. Together, they are in the process of creating the technical, intellectual and political basis for an impressive synergy of scholarly activity around the world in relationship to this massive and crucially important region of Asia. Our proposal\'s wide ranging objectives in fact meet all seven major requirements of the statuary provisions of Section 606, as detailed in the main narrative.

We define \"Tibet\" on linguistic and cultural criteria, rather than
political ones, as a zone that embraces a large part of the Himalayan
region, but also extends far north to include a huge region beyond the
Himalayas proper. By \"Himalayas,\" then, we mean an overlapping region
which includes much of the southern areas of Cultural Tibet, as well as
many other cultural regions, most notably the modern areas of Kashmir
and Nepal. While there are strong linguistic and cultural reasons behind
the separate evolution of Tibetan and Himalayan/Nepal Studies, there are
equally strong reasons to consider this world area as an integrated
region across these boundaries. Too often this massive region of Asia
has been squeezed between the dominating political forces of South and
East Asia, represented primarily by the contemporary nation-states of
India and China, and research and resources have been fragmented across
various domains.

**University of Wisconsin - Madison**

**Digital Southeast Asia Library**

Southeast Asia is a global crossroads of singular geopolitical
importance: an astonishing 30 percent of the world's trade goods transit
its central Malacca Straits. Unfortunately, we have little capacity for
information access or language reference in nearly half of this
tumultuous region. Data and dictionaries that use the Indic-derived
scripts of Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and the minority Mon, Karen,
and Shan states, and Vietnam's Roman-derived, Chinese-influenced *Quốc
Ngữ* script, are largely unavailable in the United States.

The Digital Southeast Asia Library (DSEAL) is a technically innovative
plan to build core resources for all Southeast Asian languages, starting
with the difficult scripts used by the five mainland countries. In
preparing this proposal, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for
Southeast Asian Studies and co-sponsor Center for Research in
Computational Linguistics have made concrete plans for cooperation with
the Center for Khmer Studies, the Ecole française d\'Extrême-Orient, the
Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia, the Coalition of
Teachers of Southeast Asian Languages, and 'open source' software
providers in Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam. DSEAL will
provide:

**DICTIONARIES:** We will prepare digital bilingual dictionaries, based
on the best available print reference works for the national languages
Burmese, Lao, Thai, Khmer, and Vietnamese, and the major ethnic minority
languages Mon, Karen, and Shan. These will be supplemented by historical
dictionaries. All DSEAL dictionaries will be accessible via search
software that locates national orthography, transliteration, or phonetic
transcription, and can be used both interactively, and as
program-accessible Web resources.

**SOFTWARE:** We will build information access tools for Southeast Asian
scripts, including tools for segmentation and transliteration,
conversion between font encodings, text harvesting and indexing, and
statistical analysis. **'**Reader's Helper,' and the "SEA-See"
text-as-image utility for scripts (like Khmer) that are difficult to
render in Unicode, will be linked to dictionaries, texts, and
transliteration engines to help fulfill the promise of regional
information access.

The Digital Southeast Asia Library is a long-awaited addition to the
national digital infrastructure being built with the support of a
variety of U.S. Department of Education Title VI programs. It will
enable:

-   **pedagogy** and new teaching, learning, and translation tools for
    less-commonly taught languages;

-   **scholarly inquiry** in linguistics, history,
    lexicography/etymology, and Southeast Asia area studies;

-   **scientific research** in computational linguistics and
    cross-language information retrieval; and

-   **language reference** all but unavailable to 1.8 million Americans
    of mainland Southeast Asian heritage who can typically speak -- but
    not read, or consult reference materials in \-- their heritage
    languages.