Specialised Information Service for Research Middle East, North Africa and Islamic Studies

• Applicant: Anke Berghaus-Sprengel
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: since 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 284366805

The FID is regionally and subject-specific. In regional terms, it ensures the supply of research-relevant literature to humanities, social sciences, politics, literature and linguistics on Arabic-speaking North Africa, the Middle East, Turkey, Iran as well as the Caucasus and Central Asia. The main focus is on the interests of Islamic studies, Islamic theology and research on the Christian Orient. Regarding acquisition and licensing, the specialist information service provides hard-to-access literature in the original languages of the MENA region. Due to non-transparent book markets, it is necessary to purchase new publications promptly. In consultation with the scientific community, the specialist information service assumes a reservoir function for materials from the MENA region. Licenses for databases with original language media that are not otherwise accessible in Germany are being negotiated. In addition to national licenses as preferred licenses, subject-specific user groups for specialized products will also be tested in the future. Advisory services are intended to strengthen the Middle East scientific community's willingness to publish in open access and encourage them to store digital research data. The “MENAdoc” repository offers publishing in Open Access. In consultation with rights holders, the FID intends to digitize specialist literature from previous decades that has only appeared in print so far. In addition, the German National Library's “Licensing of Out-of-Commerce Works”-service will be used, as it is offered again, to republish copyrighted German specialist literature in Green OA. In the funding period “Tesseract” and “Kraken” will be compared in order to find suitable methods to improve the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for MENAdoc digitized copies in right to left oriented scripts and to deliver full texts with search and copy function. In the future, the discovery system will be made searchable with the help of the university library's own Solr index for metadata and full-text data from the "MENAdoc" repository. In this way, MENAsearch can be used as a central research point for printed and digital media of the FID. In the field of research data management, the specialist information service is involved in the processes of the NFDI to establish standards for authority files and scripts of the MENA region. The FID will offer advice for Middle East science projects on the generation and storage of research data, with the aim of providing future subject-specific evidence of published research data in the FID's search areas. Through the systematic exchange within the network of FIDs in Germany and the humanities consortia of the NFDI as well as its own scientific community, the FIDintends to keep its own information technology expertise up to date and to communicate needs to the community and relevant consortia. The service offer includes its own website, roadshows, surveys, newsletters and tutorials.

• DFG Programme: Acquisition and Provision (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)