The Qatar Heritage Rare Book Project: Digitization and Online Publication of Treasures from the Arabian Gulf

Abstract -- In October, 2006 the Qatar Foundation in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University began a Pilot project to digitize the Qatar Heritage Book Collection and make the collection available to the world. The Pilot project will make available online 300 rare materials and 5000 books from the general collection from the Heritage Library by May, 2007. This paper will describe how the project will address the practical problems surrounding intellectual control of the collection, digitization workflow, OCR and management of the Arabic character set, and the configuration of the information management system for world-wide access to the digital library.