CDIRM project description
The American Institute of Yemeni Studies (AIYS) and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) have been
awarded a four-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Technological Innovation and Cooperation for Foreign
Information Access (TICFIA) program to catalog and digitize photographic, ethnographic, archaeological, cartographic,
and other scholarly research support materials from a variety of international locations. This is the third TICFIA grant
AIYS and CAORC have received. The first, in 1999, helped establish the union catalog of CAORC's Digital
Library for International Research; the second, initiated in 2005 as the LALORC project, is
helping American overseas research centers in several countries partner with local archival and library collections to provide
access to a rich vein of previously inaccessible scholarly material.
The current project, the Cooperative Digitization of International Research Materials (CDIRM), will utilize participating
American overseas research centers' connections to collaborate with foreign archives and with special collections that hold unique
and rare research materials. Selected materials from Guatemala, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Yemen, and Mongolia
will be made easily and freely available over the Internet to American and international scholars and students. Not only are
most of these materials uncataloged, unavailable, or unknown to scholars, most are extremely difficult to access (because of
location, unsettled political conditions, privacy issues, or bureaucratic procedures). The Coordinator of the Digital Library
for International Research, located at the Center for Research Libraries, will act as program manager.
This collaborative technology-based project provides new, shared electronic access to detailed descriptive information about
selected archive and rare collections in a unified online finding aid; online union catalogs of holdings with consolidated
item-level bibliographic searching; and full-text and image online access for prioritized subsets of the collections.
The current project will also disseminate many resources in non-Roman language alphabets (primarily various Arabic dialects,
Tibetan, and Hebrew, but potentially also Ottoman Turkish and Mongolian) and help teachers of less commonly taught languages
acquire materials for classroom use electronically.
These cost-effective projects through the Digital Library for International Research continue to create wide accessibility
to high-quality scholarly resources in humanistic studies for scholars around the world, stimulate collaborations among U.S.
and local scholars and scholarly institutions, and use technology to speed up scholarly research, open new perspectives, and
make international research possible for scholars who would otherwise have no access to these resources.
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The CDIRM project is part of the on-line Digital Library for International Research
Last updated: August 13, 2009
Please direct any feedback regarding this website to: cdirm@aiys.org.
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