São Paulo – The Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK) Library in Lebanon announced a partnership with the Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies of the North Carolina State University (NC State) in the USA, which will facilitate research in the digital collection on Arab immigration in Latin America housed in the library. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology will be used to search the collections’ journals, written in Arabic and published in Latin America by immigrants from the 19th century onwards. Pictured above, Priest Joseph Moukarzel, director of the USEK Library, and Moise Khayrallah.
According to information released by USEK, the cooperation is part of the arabicarchives.org project by the Moise Khayrallah Center, which compiles records of the first Arab immigrants in North and South America. The center created a fully searchable database of these publications, developing Arabic OCR technology to transform the scanned images of the pages into searchable text.
With the partnership, journals from USEK’s Latin American collection, which already has 150,000 scanned pages, will also be fully searchable, allowing users to easily explore their content by keyword. “We at the USEK Library, to whom this legacy has been entrusted, are proud to be part of this remarkable initiative and put our treasures and efforts in support of the work of the Khayrallah Center to achieve such a valuable goal,” said Moukarzel.
“This partnership will add a treasure trove of journals to our Arabic database and give researchers and the general public unprecedented access to an abundance of historical literature on Lebanese immigration to South America. We consider this the first step towards a vital partnership between NC State University and USEK,” said Moise Khayrallah Center director Akram Khater.
The collection on Arab immigration in Latin America is part of the Project for the Preservation of the Memory of Arab Immigration in Latin America, conceived and coordinated by USEK’s Latin American Studies and Cultures Center (CECAL), of which Brazilian historian and researcher Roberto Khatlab is the director. In Brazil, the initiative, called the Digitization Project of the Memory of Arab Immigration in Brazil, is conducted in partnership with the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce (ABCC). “The USEK–Khayrallah Center cooperation agreement is one more tool available to researchers and others interested in searching the heritage of Arab immigration in Latin America and Brazil,” says Khatlab.
Read more: Get to know the memories of Arab immigration
At the end of March, access to the first digitized materials from the Latin American collection was opened. From Brazil, 100,000 files were made available, including pages from books, magazines, journals, and photos taken by immigrants. The collection link was launched at an event that celebrated the National Day of the Arab Community in Brazil at the São Paulo Immigration Museum, organized by the museum in partnership with the ABCC. The goal is for the material to serve mainly as input for researchers. Interested parties can request the files via email to USEK.
Quick facts:
Latin American Collection – Arab Immigration
Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK)
Access the collection catalog here
Queries: reference@usek.edu.lb
Translated by Elúsio Brasileiro
