Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Receives $1.12 Million From Mellon Foundation to Implement Platform/Processes for Digital Library of the Middle East

From CLIR:

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) $1.12 million to implement a sustainable, extensible digital library platform and set of curatorial processes to federate records relating to the cultural heritage of the Middle East.
CLIR and its Digital Library Federation (DLF) program will work with technical partners at Stanford University and content providers worldwide to build on the Digital Library of the Middle East (DLME) prototype and create processes to extend the DLME.

The DLME is envisioned as a non-proprietary, multilingual library of digital objects providing greater security for, preservation of, and access to digital surrogates of cultural heritage materials.
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[Our emphasis] The platform will be portable and reusable for any future digital library project, encouraging a global coherence of access to and preservation of the cultural record. The project team, led by DLME Project Director Peter Herdrich, Curatorial Lead Elizabeth Waraksa, and a data manager/project coordinator based at Stanford Libraries, will draw on best practices from other digital library projects to support cost-effective and reproducible curatorial workflows for identifying, selecting, and federating digital assets that represent both cultural materials under threat and objects housed in libraries and museums beyond conflict zones.
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The project builds on experience gained in developing the DLME prototype, announced in January, which was supported with funding from the Whiting Foundation, and on regional partnership building and exploration of governance models in an earlier planning phase supported by Mellon. Among CLIR’s key collaborators are the Qatar National Library and the Antiquities Coalition.
CLIR and Stanford expect to launch the platform in 2020.

Access DLME Prototype
Read the Complete Announcement
Includes comments from Charles Henry, Bethany Nowviskie, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick.
See Also: A Prototype of the Digital Library of the Middle East Now Live Online (January 31, 2018)

Filed under: Data Files, Digital Collections, Funding, Interactive Tools, Libraries, National Libraries, News, Preservation