A public archive is quietly rebuilding the Arabic book record

Arabic Collections Online, run by NYU Abu Dhabi with partner libraries, has digitized nearly 18,000 out-of-print Arabic volumes and made them free to read and download. Most of these books exist in a handful of library basements; commercially they are dead, which means without deliberate digitization they simply exit the usable record. ACO's model — university funding, library partnerships, open access, proper metadata — shows what it takes to keep a language's twentieth-century print culture alive online. The gap it fills is real: Arabic remains underrepresented on the open web relative to its speakers, and the large language models now mediating knowledge learn from whatever text is available. Every properly digitized corpus shifts what machines, and the students who use them, can know. This is self-reliance applied to memory: fund the archive or lose the argument.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at Arabic Collections Online (NYU Abu Dhabi): https://aco.dlib.nyu.edu/.