Journal of Zhejiang University SCIENCE
(ISSN 1009-3095, Monthly)

2005   Vol. 6A   No. 11   p.1327-1340

The Million Book Project at Bibliotheca Alexandrina

ELDAKAR Youssef¹, EL-GAZZAR Khalid¹, ADLY Noha^†1,2, NAGI Magdy^1,2

(¹Bibliotheca Alexandrina, El Shatby 21526, Alexandria, Egypt)
(²Computer and Systems Engineering Department, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt)
^†E-mail: Noha.Adly@bibalex.org
Received Aug. 5, 2005; revision accepted Sept. 10, 2005

Abstract: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) has been developing and putting to use a workflow for turning printed books into digital books as its contribution to the building of a Universal Digital Library. This workflow is a process consisting of multiple phases, namely, scanning, image processing, OCR, digital archiving, document encoding, and publishing. Over the past couple of years, the BA has defined procedures and special techniques for the scanning, processing, OCR and publishing, especially of Arabic books. This workflow has been automated, allowing the governance of the different phases and making possible the production of 18000 books so far. The BA has also designed and implemented a framework for the encoding of digital books that allows publishing as well as a software system for managing the creation, maintenance, and publishing of the overall digital repository.

Key words: Million Book Project (MBP), Digital books workflow, Digitization, Universal Digital Library, Scanning, Multilingual OCR, Digital publishing, Image-on-text, DjVu, PDF
doi:10.1631/jzus.2005.A1327             CLC number: TP391