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The Rabat Genizah Project
NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant
White Paper
Oren Kosansky, Project Director
kosansky@lclark.edu

Introduction

The Rabat Genizah Project is the outcome of the activities undertaken with support of a Level 2 NEH Digital Humanities awarded in 2011. The grant proposal, entitled “Intellectual Property and International Collaboration in the Digital Humanities: The Jewish Community Archives of Morocco,” focused on two emerging challenges in digital humanities.[1] First, as research agendas are increasingly conceptualized on a global scale, it was recognized that international ethical codes and legal constraints must be negotiated between academic scholars and local stakeholders. Accordingly, the project aimed to explore moral and intellectual property rights issues in the international environment and to develop protocols and guidelines accordingly. Second, this project was committed to the use of free and open-source technologies to involve international scholars and local community members in all phasesof creating, developing, and managing the emergent digital resource. The Rabat Genizah Project represents the realization of these goals in a set of collaborative relationships, scholarly activities, contributing publics and digital resources. This report summarizes these activities and accomplishments, while also documenting those project objectives that were not achieved. The successes and challenges together offer lessons for the ongoing development and expansion of The Rabat Genizah Project and, it is hoped, for similar projects working to coordinate the intersection of scholarly and heritage goals and their respective publics.

Project Activities

Our activities have included collaboration and consultation with a range of representatives from the scholarly and heritage publics in both the United States and Morocco. Our major partner continues to be the Casablanca Jewish Museum and its parent organization, the Foundation for Judeo-Moroccan Cultural Heritage, which is an affiliate of the Moroccan Jewish community’s governing body (Counsel of the Jewish Communities of Morocco). Selection of the seventy-five documents for inclusion in our initial public display was accomplished in consultation with museum staff and members of the project advisory board. Making use of the project website, we continue to explore processes for soliciting input from a wider range of scholarly and heritage publics with potential interest in the collection.

 Creation and Inventory of the Physical Archive

At the beginning of the project, the source collection from which the digital archive and resource is based was an unsorted cache of documents whose disorganization reflected the original state in which the materials were found. Originally destined for ritual burial in a genizah, no effort had been made to inventory or catalog the wide assortment of items contained in the collection.[2] Under these circumstances, the project team developed strategies for the creation of the digital archive simultaneously with the creation of an inventoried and catalogued physical archive. Although not included in the original project proposal, the decision to begin by organizing the physical archive and compiling a complete inventory of the collection was motivated by several factors. First, the inventory would be an essential resource for our local partner, the Casablanca Jewish Museum, and provide a foundation for future use by both scholarly and heritage publics. Second, the project director and advisory board determined that an informed selection of documents for the pilot digital archive would benefit from a clear sense of the collection as a whole. Third, a comprehensive, well-formatted, and digitally accessible inventory would provide a foundation for subsequent phases of the project, both during the period funded by the current NEH grant and beyond. It soon became apparent that the time and effort required to complete this work would affect our ability to move as quickly as projected to subsequent activities articulated in the NEH proposal. Given that our time in the physical archives was limited, we determined this was a worthwhile trade-off that would benefit the project in the long run. The creation and initial inventory of the physical archive was largely accomplished between May and August 2013 by a research team comprised of the project director and two undergraduate research assistants from Lewis & Clark College.^[3]

             Pursuant to our efforts to consider the Moroccan institutional environments in which the project is situated, along with the emerging international conventions in the management of digital collections, several considerations guided the development of the archive. Consultation with museum and library professionals in Morocco was crucial to the creation of metadata and data that would operate fluidly in Moroccan institutional contexts. Consultation with museum and library professionals in Morocco was facilitated by Zhor Rehihil, the curator of the Casablanca Jewish Museum and an affiliate of the Moroccan Ministry of Culture. Her contacts within the Ministry and the Moroccan National Library were instrumental in organizing a project workshop in June 2011 and arranging meetings with staff in the digital collections division of the national library. The workshop brought together scholars, consular officials, museum professionals, and students from the United States and Morocco to consider the role of the project in the context of Moroccan institutional initiatives in academic, museum, library, and archive environments. The workshop and subsequent meetings at the National Library of Morocco helped us to align our inventory strategies and software (e.g. Microsoft Excel and Google Spreadsheets) with similar projects operating in Morocco.

             The challenge of working with a multilingual collection and developing correspondingly multilingual digital resources required exploration of previous efforts with similar scope. Exploration of projects dealing with multilingual collections in French, Arabic, and Hebrew helped us to identify conventions, controlled vocabularies, metadata glossaries, and other resources related to the translation of inventories into the languages associated with our project. Our plans to work across these four languages proved to be very ambitious, as we discovered that even modest bilingual projects were few and far between. Several national and international library systems and consortia offered possible models developing bilingual digital platforms with coordinated metadata vocabularies: The National of Israel Library (English and Hebrew); Library and Archives Canada (English and French); The National Library of France (French and English); Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Arabic, English, and French); and Judaica Europeana (multiple languages). Consultations with Judaica and Middle East librarians at major U.S. Universities confirmed that there are no established strategies or conventions for creating multilingual digital resources across these languages. Likewise, the Omeka platform (version 1.5.3) requires major customization to fully support multilingual metadata associated with a single item.^[4] Given these limitations, we opted for an approach that developed the collection inventory and digital resource initially in two languages (English and French) with functionality to accommodate the contribution of transcriptions, translations, and critical annotations in all languages associated with the project.

             Alignment between the multiple metadata conventions associated with various digital platforms engaged by the project was required. From the start, we aimed to structure the collection inventory with an eye toward the subsequent platforms (Omeka) and xml encoding languages employed by the project. In particular, we considered how metadata elements established by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), used by the Omeka platform, might be mapped onto elements established by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Our intention to employ the Omeka platform was guided by several factors: the open source framework and the collaborative ethos of the initiative; the established expertise of the digital services librarians at Lewis & Clark College; and the robust functionality of the platform and its associated plugins. One challenge we faced was coordinating the overlapping, but not identical, metadata conventions across these multiple environments. Our activities, therefore, included research into previous efforts at crosswalk mapping between DCMI and TEI metadata.

 Research into U.S. and Moroccan Intellectual Property and Fair Use Environments

As stipulated in our proposal, we explored the pertinent intellectual property regimes in which the project operates. Initial consultations with advisory board members and Lewis & Clark College General Counsel, David Ellis, confirmed that fare use allowances in the United States gave sufficient leeway for development of public digital archives for research and teaching purposes of our project. These consultations also introduced us to myriad resources currently available for assessing the fair use status of any given materials in the U.S. context. The project director conducted research into the pertinent Moroccan regulations. This research included: 1) examination of relevant Moroccan legislation and secondary analysis of its scope and development;[5] 2) consultation with Moroccan university faculty who specialize in intellectual property issues;[6] and 3) consultation with private legal counsel in Morocco with experience in intellectual property issues.[7] Based on this research, it was discovered that Moroccan intellectual property law corresponds significantly with U.S. legislation and provides similar allowances for academic fair use.

             All parties consulted gave assurance that the scope of the public digital resource falls within fair use allowances. Moreover, given the close alignment of U.S. and Moroccan intellectual property law, the common rubrics currently in use for determining the fair use status of any given item in the U.S. environment are similarly valid in the Moroccan one. All items are being accessed using the Fair Use Evaluator tool created by the American Library Association before they are made available for public display on the project website.[8] The correspondence between U.S. and Moroccan intellectual property environments also promotes an integrated application of Creative Commons licensing. This licensing pertains to content created and authored by the project, rather than to the source items on which it is based.

Creation of the Digital Collection and the Omeka Platform for Collaborative Research

Given the limited resources of the Casablanca Jewish Museum, and thus the challenges it faces in ensuring the proper conservation of the Rabat Genizah materials, we gave initial priority to the digital preservation of the collection beyond the scope of the original proposal. The museum provided adequate space to create a digital lab composed of: 1) two workstations, each including a scanner and computer, and 2) a platform for digitizing oversized items with a digital camera. Student researchers and volunteers from Lewis & Clark College (see below) created archival quality digital surrogates (600dpi/TIF images) of approximately 80% of the collection during the summer of 2011. Equipment for the digital lab, guidelines for its set-up and breakdown, and protocols for its use were developed and remain available for future phases of the project.

             The project team began development of the Omeka platform and TEI protocols in fall 2011, with major work beginning in spring 2013. Beta testing of the pilot website began in summer 2013. The Omeka platform and associated plugins offer many advantages that have been exploited by the project to date: open source opportunities for customization; support of items including multiple image files; support of Unicode characters and html editing that permits composition and display in multiple languages; fluid integration of the customizable Scripto plugin to support crowd-sourced transcription, translation, and annotation in multiple languages; availability of CSV import plugin that facilitated the migration of metadata from the inventory into Omeka; organizational tools, such as “Collections” that facilitated the creation of user groups working on tailored sets of items; and customizable search, sort, and linked metadata functions that permit both open-ended and guided exploration of the collection.

             At the same time, our efforts to develop the Omeka platform for the full range of project objectives presented certain challenges and revealed several limitations. First, Omeka has limited ability to include multiple language options for metadata associated with a single item. Given this limitation, we opted to upload all metadata in English while exploring options for display in the other project languages as well. Second, initial problems emerged with how the CSV import plugin handled non-Latin Unicode characters in Hebrew and Arabic. During test uploads we discovered that Hebrew and Arabic characters were not arriving correctly into the Omeka database. After researching the problem, and following reports of similar issues faced by other projects,[9] we eventually determined that certain settings on the Watzek Library servers needed to be changed to accommodate Unicode characters. Third, Omeka’s search function does not include data fields generated by the Scripto plugin.

             Though these limitations affected the project workflow, none fundamentally altered the overall activities of the project. We continued to develop the platform in multiple languages, even though the multilingual extent of the project website was not as robust as envisioned. We were able to alter our server setting to allow for the import of non-Latin characters. We encourage the Omeka development team to continue their consideration of how best to address these issues in future versions of the platform.

             A more significant challenge emerged with respect to our goal of creating digital texts following TEI protocols. As we began to explore how best to incorporate TEI into the project, it became apparent that the current TEI plugin for Omeka would not serve our purposes for at least two reasons. First, the crosswalk between TEI header and DCMI elements embedded in the plugin could not accommodate the range of document types included in our collection and was restrictively limited in the scope of metadata included. Further research into the issue revealed that there are as yet few models for how TEI and DCMI metadata elements might be mapped for various purposes. Second, the plugin has very limited ability to display text based on robust TEI encoding, including renditions of a single text in multiple languages.

             Given the relatively underdeveloped stage of the plugin, the customization required to make it useful for the project was prohibitive. Under these circumstances, we decided to develop the Omeka platform without involvement of the TEI plugin. We intend to use TEI in future phases of the project as we explore methods for authoring critical digital editions of documents in the collection. Towards these ends, we drafted a preliminary TEI header template and a customized crosswalk from DCMI to TEI.[10]

             As planned, beta testing of the Omeka website included the collection of transcriptions, transliterations, and translations associated with approximately fifty documents using the Scripto plugin. One especially productive strategy to have emerged involves collaboration with undergraduate foreign language students in Portland, Oregon. The project has partnered with instructors of upper level French courses at Lewis & Clark College and Hebrew courses at Portland State University to involve students in the creation of digital texts based on items in the Rabat Genizah collection (see groups). These pilot efforts have been enthusiastically received by faculty, who appreciate the resource as a tool for engaging students with a range of language texts, and by students, who are excited by the prospect of acting as collaborators in an ongoing research project. Aside from providing raw transcriptions and translations, these activities have helped the project team to consider protocols for workflow management, to publicize the project at the respective institutions, and to generate interest among students who may be recruited for future collaboration in project activities.

Accomplishments and Grant Products

Project accomplishments favorably reflect the majority of goals articulated in the grant application. These accomplishments can be divided into the following categories: 1) establishment and cultivation of overlapping communities of interest, investment, and cooperation in the digital archives; 2) development of protocols and procedures for ensuring that digital humanities projects conform to international intellectual property frameworks; and 3) creation of an online digital platform for collaborative scholarship, exhibition, and resource development that attends to multiple academic, professional, and community stakeholders.

Engaging Scholarly and Heritage Communities

As envisioned, our project has engaged multiple stakeholders in the ongoing development of the digital archives. Insofar as one primary aim of the project has been to promote such shared investment, this activity itself represents one major accomplishment. The two partnering institutions, Lewis & Clark College and the Casablanca Jewish Museum, along with the project advisory board have provided anchors for these endeavors. One indicator of our early success has been the unsolicited buzz around the project in social media even prior to the formal launch of the project website.[11] Interest and encouragement has come from scholars and cultural stakeholders in the United States and Morocco. More proactively, the project director has cultivated relationships with teachers, scholars, librarians, and museum professionals as a foundation for ongoing investment in the project.

Inventory, Digital Archives, and Omeka Website

As of the submission of the report, the inventory includes 1,698 cataloged works representing approximately 80% of the full collection. The digital archive currently includes 4009 preservation quality images (600dpi/tiff). These master images are stored on multiple hard drives at Lewis & Clark College and the Casablanca Jewish Museum. In the near future, master storage will be moved to web-based servers that will enhance sustainability and provide synchronized access in the United States and Morocco. The project website (https://rabatgenizahproject.watzekdi.net/) represents one of the major grant accomplishments and products.

             The website currently emphasizes English and French, representing the major languages used by the project’s partner institutions and the intended international scholarly and heritage publics in the United States, Morocco, Europe, and Israel. The metadata is currently displayed only in English, pending the development of multilingual display functionality on the Omeka platform. Information about the project is also presented in Arabic and Hebrew, with fuller inclusion of those languages being an objective of future project phases.

             Tiered access to works in the collection promotes open access while respecting fair use standards in the United States and Morocco. The website serves as a repository of the full digital archive, with access limited to the advisory board, Casablanca Jewish Museum staff, and approved researchers. A public exhibition space and collaborative research environment provides public access to a subset of works selected by the project director in consultation with the Casablanca Jewish Museum staff and the advisory board.

The project research team agreed that providing interactive access to the substantial number of works in modern Judeo-Arabic is one of the project’s major contributions. As such, the website features sorting tools for consulting this subset of works. The website includes a customized version of the Scripto plugin, amended to provide instructional guidance while facilitating ease of use and right-to-left input, facilitating crowd-sourced transcription, transliteration, translation and annotation of works in the collection.

             The majority of initial and emergent project goals have been achieved. At the same time, the realization of some goals has been postponed based on: 1) shifting priorities that reflect the overarching values of the project; 2) consultation with local stakeholders; and 3) the limitations of the digital platforms and resources utilized. The project goal of providing interactive access to a searchable set of fifty to one hundred documents has been met. Since not all of the public items have been entered into a workflow to produce digital texts, the project director will continue to recruit scholars, students and community stakeholders in the creation of critical digital editions of works in the collection. Towards these ends the project director will: 1) continue to coordinate efforts to integrate the project into undergraduate language courses at Lewis & Clark College and other local institutions of higher education; 2) expand this effort to regional and national levels, with an objective to include graduate students working in Judeo-Arabic languages; 3) formalize a working group of contributing scholars and editors to assume collaborative responsibility for moving fifty selected items through the complete process of transcription, transliteration, and translation.

Audiences and Evaluation

The project was conceived to take an inclusive approach that envisioned initiatives in digital humanities as a way to bridge the gap between “audiences” and “collaborators.” Rather that producing a resource to be consulted at a later stage by scholarly audiences, local stakeholders, and heritage communities, the project has aimed to invite these constituents into decision making at all stages of the project development. To date, project successes and enthusiastic public responses have confirmed our confidence of the promise and feasibility of this objective, while also helping us to refine our understanding of our audiences and identify attendant challenges.

             Our efforts to identify concrete avenues for collaboration with interested scholars and institutional partners helped us come to a more refined understanding of the multiple publics that might mobilize, and be mobilized, around the project. Our project’s focus on the cultural heritage of Jewish Morocco led us to appreciate the various Moroccan institutions and publics with investment and interest in the endeavor. The Casablanca Jewish Museum, as an initiative of the organized Jewish community in Morocco and as an institution whose goal is to educate the broader Moroccan public, represents one cross-section of our project’s intended audience.

             Moroccan Jewish audiences are no longer located primarily in Morocco itself, but rather in the global Moroccan Jewish diaspora. It is precisely in such contexts that a web-based digital platform provides unique opportunities for a heritage community in which “local” stakeholders are disbursed across the globe. The existence of several Moroccan Jewish cultural heritage websites testifies to such opportunities. The same situation presents challenges to identifying and collaborating with individuals and organizations that represent diverse and potentially competing interests. Insofar as the project is based in Morocco and the collection is owned by the Casablanca Jewish Museum, primary input has come from Jewish representation within Morocco itself. Correspondingly, we are exploring future options for partnering with and recruiting contributors from Jewish community organizations and schools within the resident Jewish community in Morocco. One model would be to support the use of the project website in Hebrew language classes at the secondary school level, following the model established in college level language courses in Portland, Oregon. Internationally, similar partnerships might be developed with Moroccan Jewish cultural heritage organizations, especially in North America, Europe, and Israel.

             Our project also reflects the Casablanca Jewish Museum’s commitment to serving the non-Jewish Moroccan public as an educational resource for the Jewish aspects of Moroccan heritage more generally. Along these lines, there is already an emerging public of Muslim students, scholars, authors, and cultural activists committed to this endeavor. The Mimouna Club, which promotes cultural and educational programming related to Moroccan Jewish Heritage, at Al-Akhawayan University is one institutionalized form of this public and the wider audience it represents.[12] This self-identified audience of interested parties can provide a conduit for reaching broader Moroccan audiences that might otherwise overlook The Rabat Genizah Project.

             Our project offers a resource for collaborative scholarship, research, and teaching in the United States and other international contexts. Insofar as scholarly research is typically channeled through university libraries and instigated in the context of university courses, institutions of higher education are crucial to publicity and to locating and recruiting contributing audiences for the project. As such, we will continue to disseminate project information among library, digital humanities professionals, and faculty, especially at institutions with Middle East Studies and Jewish Studies collections and programs. In Portland, Oregon we have found opportunities to invite contributions from student audiences in undergraduate language classes at Lewis & Clark College. The online platform provides the necessary tools for scaling local initiatives to national and international levels.

             From the start, we emphasized efforts to address and involve multiple stakeholders situated in the multilingual and international context of the project. While we have been able to incorporate four languages into the project website, current technical limitations have hindered our ability to allow for equal representation of the languages. Future phases of the project will aim to develop the digital resource equally in Arabic and Hebrew, as well as in English and French.

             We were also cognizant that building a digital platform will not, in itself, generate contributing audiences drawn equally from the multiple stakeholders we hope to address and serve.[13] Proactive recruitment and publicity have been aimed at seeding awareness and interest in the project across its various envisioned publics. Given the project’s home location at Lewis & Clark College and the most robust development of the digital resource in English, it is not surprising that most progress has been made in addressing and involving American scholars, library professionals, digital humanists, and students. The project will continue to focus on these audiences while also expanding the scope of involvement in the United States and Morocco.

Challenges, Prospects and Continuation

The project team faced a number of challenges in realizing the full range of our initial goals. These challenges necessitated certain alterations in our work and helped us to plan future phases of the project. The project director underestimated the amount of work required to prepare the source material upon which the digital resource is based. As discussed above, the project team decided early on that realization of several project goals – collaborative consultation, attention to the interests of local stakeholders, consideration of pertinent intellectual property issues, and selection of representative documents – required a comprehensive assessment and inventory of the collection. Given the raw state of the collection at the beginning of the project period, inventory work occupied more time than initially allotted. While this extended work helped us to establish a strong foundation for continued work on the project, it also reflected a weakness in our original planning, which did not fully take into account the magnitude of the effort and so stifled projected progress.

      Our efforts uncovered significant challenges in the full realization of the project’s ambitious multilingual goals. Efforts to conform with best practices in the use of controlled vocabularies in order to facilitate searchability entailed research into coordination of such vocabularies across the project languages. The results were uneven. While some work has been done to map English and French language controlled vocabularies, much less has been done with respect to Hebrew, and still less Arabic. Our selection of the Omeka platform both facilitated the incorporation of multiple languages and presented certain challenges. The fact that Omeka supports Unicode characters allowed for generally easy incorporation of Arabic and Hebrew text into the website. As open source products, Omeka and its associated plugins allowed for customization to support right-to-left languages. However, Omeka limited our ability to associate multilingual metadata with single items without significant customization.

             While we remain enthusiastic about the potential of TEI as an integral component in the creation of digital texts, our intention to integrate TEI more fully in the start-up phase of the project was hindered by the underdevelopment of tools for publishing TEI texts in Omeka. Exploration of the broader environment revealed, moreover, that there are limited open source options for publishing TEI documents. We look forward to emerging developments in this area, as exemplified by the TAPAS project. Future phase of the project will explore possibilities for contributing to the development of TEI/OMEKA compatibility.[14]

             The success of the project in meeting the majority of proposed goals demonstrates the desirability and feasibility of locating significant digital humanities initiatives at liberal arts colleges, which present unparalleled opportunities for integrating digital scholarship with teaching and community outreach. This promise is especially evident at institutions like Lewis & Clark College, which have established commitments and resources dedicated to digital humanities. Along these lines, one strength of the project was to allow the project director to become familiar with the most current developments in digital humanities, to become proficient in using a set of its tools, and to gain experience for continued leadership in the field especially as it is applied within Middle East and Jewish Studies. Yet, project directors who are faculty members with diverse teaching and administrative responsibilities must judiciously assess the relationship between ambitious project goals and anticipated timelines.

             With the pilot digital resource now publically available, the project director will continue to oversee the ongoing development of the online resource, its use in college and university classrooms, and outreach aimed at increasing the scope of contributing audiences. Short term development of the site will include design and functionality modifications based on user feedback as well as the progressive addition of digital items to the public area of the website based on continued consultation with museum staff, advisory board members, and collaborating language instructors. Immediate plans for continued development of the digital collection include a ten-week research trip to Casablanca in summer 2014. Funded by a Mellon Grant for Student Faculty Research Collaboration, the project director and an undergraduate research assistant will be based at the Casablanca Jewish Museum where they will: continued digitization of the archive; continue translation of the collection inventory fully into French, Arabic, and Hebrew; and work with museum staff to design an exhibit of the physical collection and the digital project.

             The project team will continue to develop and customize the digital resource. Authoring of TEI texts in relationship to potential digital publication platforms, such as OMEKA or TAPAS, represents one area of future development. A second area of development will focus on further customization of the Omeka platform and emerging plugins to suit project needs. As noted in this report, several issues have already been identified: 1) development of the TEI plugin beyond its current rudimentary functionality; 2) development of the Scripto plugin to support searchability and provide more robust options for multilingual versions of a single text (e.g. incorporation of online Hebrew and Arabic keyboards; and 3) development of strategies for allowing single items to be associated with multilingual versions of all multilingual data and metadata.

             Using the Omeka platform developed in the start-up phase of the project, the research team will also create a pilot digital archive of samples from other archival collections owned by the museum. The project director will further explore opportunities for emerging partnerships with other projects devoted to digital scholarship, collaboration, and preservation in Jewish Morocco. The Omeka platform, fair-use protocols, and collaborative methods developed in the start-up phase of this project provide a foundation for the development of an integrated resource for a number of other digital projects currently in their initial phases.[15] Based on communication with individuals leading these projects, there is enthusiastic support for exploring possible avenues of collaboration.

This project is based at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon in partnership with the Casablanca Jewish Museum, in Casablanca, Morocco. Ce projet se base à Lewis & Clark College à Portland (Oregon), en partenariat avec le Musée du Judaïsme Marocain, à Casablanca, Maroc.

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