BA Launches the Mirror Site for Online Access to Consolidated Information on Serials (OACIS) for the Middle East
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Alexandria, 22 February 2005—Guided by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) goals to preserve heritage for future generations in digital form; and provide universal access to human knowledge, the International School of Information Science (ISIS) at BA has been actively contributing to the OACIS (Online Access to Consolidated Information on Serials) project.
The mission of OACIS is to improve access to Middle Eastern serials in libraries in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East and to make scholarly literature from, and about, the Middle East widely and easily available to scholars around the world. The aim is to develop a better understanding of the varied economies, politics, languages, and cultures of the Middle East.
Initiated by Yale University Library, the OACIS project was launched to create a publicly and freely accessible, continuously updated listing of Middle East journals and serials, including those available in print, microform, and online. The listing, which will be available on the Web, will identify libraries that own the materials as well as exact holdings, initially for Arabic and English language titles and then for an ever-expanding group of Middle Eastern languages. As it develops, Project OACIS will also serve as a gateway to those serials by enhancing content delivery of titles.
The OACIS system was launched in November 2003 and currently comprises 14 partners (including 9 US universities, one German university, two Jordanian Universities, one Syrian University and Bibliotheca Alexandrina), 42 languages (with the top collections in Arabic, Persian and Turkish) and 23,000 unique title records.
BA has been acting as a major Middle Eastern partner in the OACIS project since August 2004, contributing to the project through enriching and updating the OACIS catalog on a quarterly basis (in February, May, August, November), with the records available in the BA catalog. A system for automatic uploading of BA records will soon be implemented to allow the more efficient update of the OACIS catalog.
On 25 January 2005, ISIS launched a mirror site of the system (http://oacis.bibalex.org). The mirror site aims to enhance access to the OACIS database in the Middle East region and to serve as a backup of the original.
BA also managed a digitization discovery project which has helped significantly in the planning for future online delivery of journal article content through OACIS. ISIS has been working on digitizing serials and journals to be included in the system. Scanning, processing and OCRing of BA and Yale University Library copyright-free collections are currently in progress, with 25 Arabic, English and French journal volumes completed so far.
The ISIS technical team has also designed and implemented a content retrieval web interface, to view and search the digital collection and individual titles, as well as an Arabic web interface for the collection.