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Arabic Collections Online
An interview with Guy Burak about the development of ACO and how the collections advance knowledge on Arabic-language publishing.
Posted on May 27, 2025 in Ask an Archivist
In this Ask an Archivist, Guy Burak, Librarian for Middle Eastern, Islamic and Jewish Studies and Interim Librarian for African Studies at New York University, details Arabic Collections Online (ACO), a digitized, open access collection of Arabic language content. Beginning with a background of ACO, Guy describes how the Collections came to feature materials from a range of institutions. Guy further explains the value of making Arabic language content accessible to audiences within and outside of academia, along with how ACO helps expand scholarship on Arabic monographs and publications.
I understand that Arabic Collections Online (ACO) originated in 2013 as a collaboration between NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU New York. Could you provide an overview of the project and explain how it came to include volumes from partner institutions?
The idea behind ACO was to make some of the largest Arabic-language collections in North America and the Middle East freely accessible to the world. NYU partnered with Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, the American University of Cairo, the American University of Beirut, and the National Archives of the UAE to digitize the Arabic-language monographs we believe are in the public domain (according to the copyright research we have). Previously, these collections were not readily available to users in the region and elsewhere. Thanks to ACO, these collections are now easily accessible and downloadable for any purpose.
Who is the intended audience of Arabic Collections Online? Are there any prominent examples of collection materials being used in research or curricula?
From the beginning, the intention was to make the content of ACO openly accessible to the world. This means that the intended audience consists of academics and non-academics. The collection is heavily used by scholars around the world, with a good percentage of them coming from the Middle East and North Africa. During the COVID-19 pandemic, ACO was used extensively by scholars who could not travel or did not have access to their physical libraries. We have also had several instances in which readers found publications by their family members. In addition, over the years several researchers who are interested in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies have contacted ACO and asked for permission to use ACO for their research.
“The collection is heavily used by scholars around the world, with a good percentage of them coming from the Middle East and North Africa.”
How have workflows evolved as the project expanded its partners, received grant funding, and developed infrastructure like ACO’s book viewer?
Naturally, when a project is going on for such a long time period (more than a decade now), workflows change. While the number of partners has remained quite stable from the beginning, different partners have digitized their content differently: some shipped the books to NYU (and then to an external vendor), some digitized in-house, and some used both options.
NYU relied on the metadata from the partner institutions and enhanced it to the best of its abilities. NYU has taken the lead on conducting copyright research according to the copyright laws of the different countries in the region. Currently, NYU is migrating to a new reader and is committed to keeping the platform operational, in addition to working on OCR-ing the content.
The project has received grants over the years from Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin’s Arcadia Fund and the Carnegie Corporation.
Pages from Masājid al-Qāhirat qabl a̓sr al-Mamālīk.
ACO includes materials in over 10,000 subjects such as world history, language and literature, law, and philosophy. How does this range of categories, and ACO as a whole, broaden understandings of and future scholarship on Arabic language content?
The collections at ACO reflect the holdings of some of the world’s largest Arabic-language collections. Many of these titles are not easily accessible in many countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa and the world more generally. ACO provides readers with easy access to canonical and rare titles and publications. In addition, since we digitized the books in their entirety (including covers), the Collections have been used by scholars coming from very different academic and professional backgrounds, from historians to graphic designers.
ACO is very inclusive in its curation. We do not curate titles based on content but based on the copyright dates in different countries. Therefore, the project has digitized materials that may not have made the cut in projects curated based on content. For this reason, ACO provides access to government publications, textbooks, museum catalogs, and obscure titles that would not have been digitized otherwise. In so doing, ACO provides a much broader perspective on Arabic-language publishing and printing than many other digitization projects.
In a 2018 press release about ACO, NYU Abu Dhabi stated that “more than 80 percent [of ACO’s users] are in the Middle East.” How do you ensure that the collection is accessible for these communities?
From its inception, the assumption has been that a significant percentage of ACO’s users will be Arabic speakers. To serve these users, the goal has been to make the platform and user support fully bilingual. All our records and the documentation are fully translated. Queries from users in Arabic are answered in Arabic.
Page from Matḥaf al-Ḥaḍārah al-Miṣrīyah.
The about section on ACO’s website underscores that, “Many older Arabic books are out-of-print, in fragile condition, and are otherwise rare materials that are in danger of being lost.” Further, ACO stresses that, “Important Arabic language content is not widely available on the web.” Could you speak to the role of archivists preserving this content and making it available to the public?
Despite many decades of collecting, there are still significant gaps across formats in North American and Middle Eastern collections. As far as monographs are concerned (the main focus of ACO), libraries and special collections need to be mindful of these gaps and actively acquire publications that were not deemed worthy of academic research in the past. Projects like ACO are important in drawing attention to the broader publishing scene in Arabic. In doing so, they enable new scholarship on the region to emerge.
“Projects like ACO are important in drawing attention to the broader publishing scene in Arabic.”
What does the future look like for ACO? Are there any upcoming initiatives?
ACO is still ongoing. We are currently concentrating on OCR-ing the content to make it fully searchable. As mentioned, we are also planning on migrating to a new reader. We keep adding new content, though to a much lesser extent than we used to. We hope that the improved searchability will make it easier for new users to discover the collection.
About the interviewee:
Guy Burak is Librarian for Middle Eastern, Islamic and Jewish Studies and Interim Librarian for African Studies at New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library.
Learn more about Arabic Collections Online.
This interview was conducted by Ashley Roy. She is the digital media assistant at Choice.
Enjoy this interview? Check out more Ask an Archivist interviews from Choice.
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