Today, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced funding for 208 humanities projects, including a $50,000 grant to JSTOR to support research on the high-quality digitization and digital preservation of Arabic-language scholarly journals.

JSTOR’s NEH-funded research will include the development of digitization and indexing guidelines for Arabic-language scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences, the digitization of a small test run of Arabic-language scholarly journal issues, and an assessment of the cost, quality, and feasibility of the digitization process. An important consideration in this research will be how to digitize Arabic-language texts with optical character recognition (OCR) of sufficient quality that the content can be made available for full-text searching and crawling by search engines—key prerequisites for making scholarly texts fully discoverable online. The project deliverable will be a freely available white paper making available the findings from our investigation.

Read the NEH press release to learn more.