U.S. Transfers Control Of Iraqi E-Library

The United States on Monday is expected to announce the transfer of control of an online research library to the Iraqi people, according to a federally-funded nonprofit organization that had managed the project. The move represents the culmination of a four-year U.S.-Iraq partnership to reinvigorate scientific study in the Middle Eastern country after decades of myopic focus on weapons systems.

Due to Saddam Hussein's militarization of the scientific community, innovation languished in Iraq, once the home of esteemed and influential scientists, physicians and engineers. Launched in May 2006, the goal of the Iraqi Virtual Science Library was to teach Iraqi citizens how to use the Web for educational purposes, bring them up to speed on scientific advances and reconnect Iraq's knowledge base with the global scientific community.

But security, both physical and cyber, frustrated initial efforts to get the project started, according to officials from the State and Defense departments, American information technology firms and U.S. academic institutions - all of whom helped coordinate the effort.

The nonprofit, congressionally-authorized U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation has overseen the project since July 2006, all the while helping to safely shift responsibility to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and the Ministry of Science and Technology. A secure server based in the United States has powered the website, which registered Iraqi users can log onto from anywhere using a password.

To get technical help in setting up the Iraq-side of the system, Iraqi citizens had to speak softly on the phone and sometimes hang up abruptly if discovered talking in English, so as to avoid being associated with a U.S. government operation. Still, building an online institution was easier than building a brick-and-mortar university at the time. Because of Iraq's diminished engineering capacity and looting, the Iraqis did not have the skills or infrastructure to build a physical library. Nor did they have the IT capabilities necessary to construct a virtual one.

The library began as an open source system -- meaning the underlying code was made available to the Iraqi research community for free -- so that Iraq eventually could customize and manage the website itself.

The library now offers access to thousands of journals from major publishers, including the American Society of Civil Engineering, Association for Computing Machinery, Elsevier Publishing, IEEE Publishing, Project MUSE and Thomson Reuters.