Yale Library and NovoDynamics® Sign Research Agreement

Dec 1, 2006
New Haven, CT

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut, December 1, 2006 - The Yale University Library announced that its team for two granted projects — Project AMEEL (Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library) and Iraq ReCollection — has signed a research agreement with NovoDynamics of Ann Arbor, Michigan, regarding the use of its product VERUS™, an advanced Arabic optical character recognition (OCR) software solution.

The mission of Project AMEEL is to create a scholarly Web-based portal for the study of the Middle East, including its history, culture, development, and contemporary face; and within this portal, to integrate new or existing scholarly digital content. Iraq ReCollection project will digitize a group of key humanistic Iraqi journals held by Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. These journals will form part of the AMEEL electronic archive that permits 1) retrieval and display via the Internet, and 2) integration into other existing electronic systems, such as the search engine of OACIS (http://www.library.yale.edu/oacis). Both projects propose to develop an approach and "best practices" for scanning Arabic language-based humanistic content.

The selected content will be digitized via scanning. The scanned images will be converted, using NovoDynamics' VERUS™ Arabic OCR software, into a form that permits search, retrieval, and display. Thanks to NovoDynamics' innovative technology for extracting Arabic information from complex and degraded documents, the Yale team can retrieve information that has never been accessible in the past. While collaborating with NovoDynamics to enhance its VERUS™ software for library use, the Yale team will also be working in partnership with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt on complementary digitization initiatives.

This project is funded under the U.S. Department of Education's Title VI TICFIA Program, which fosters the development of innovative techniques or programs that address national teaching and research needs in international education and foreign languages by using technologies to access, collect, organize, preserve, and widely disseminate information on world regions and countries other than the United States. http://www.ed.gov/programs/iegpsticfia/index.html

In response to the damage sustained by museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions in Iraq, the National Endowment for the Humanities funded an initiative called "Recovering Iraq's Past," to preserve and document resources which, because of their intellectual content and cultural value, are deemed vital for research and education. http://www.neh.gov/news/archive/20051221.html

NovoDynamics' solutions remove the digitization barriers typically created by challenging languages and degraded documents and fill a growing need within the academic, private and public sectors for advanced data acquisition and retrieval technologies. For more information, please visit http://www.novodynamics.com.