Baghdad, once a center of academic discourse and literature, now works to recover this culture. The city, as with the rest of Iraq, is in the process of rebuilding its library resources and infrastructure, much of which was lost or damaged in the looting that followed the second Iraq war in 2003.
(Media-Newswire.com) - Washington — “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes, Baghdad reads,” went an old saying in the Arab world.
Baghdad, once a center of academic discourse and literature, now works to recover this culture. The city, as with the rest of Iraq, is in the process of rebuilding its library resources and infrastructure, much of which was lost or damaged in the looting that followed the second Iraq war in 2003.
To restock the shelves, some Iraqi libraries have sought support from book donation programs. Though several donation efforts sprouted and yielded temporary success, few have survived due to a lack of funding. The Sabre Foundation, an American nonprofit organization, maintains one of the only ongoing, organized donation efforts.
Sabre has coordinated substantial contributions of books and materials to Iraqi and other Middle Eastern libraries and schools.
“We are currently working on our 22nd shipment to Iraq and probably will send out one more before the end of the year,” said Elisabeth Mitchell, a program officer at Sabre.
Sabre has shipped more than 250,000 new books, CD-ROMs and other educational materials to Iraq. All books are in English, the “preferred second language of choice,” according to Sabre’s October 2009 summary of its work in Iraq.
Though responsible for an impressive number of donations, Sabre’s main focus is on the quality of the shipments, not necessarily the quantity. The organization works with major U.S. publishers, including various university presses ( those of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale all have contributed ), the McGraw- Hill Companies and medical publishers, to ensure it has “new, up-to-date, high-quality materials that are relevant to our recipients,” Mitchell said.
To target its shipments to the needs of the various libraries and institutions it serves, Sabre partners with nongovernmental organizations ( NGOs ) in the United States and abroad. Sabre provides the NGOs with lists of titles available from the approximately 1 million it has stored in its Lawrence, Massachusetts, warehouse. The NGOs then select materials and quantities of items that are best for the specific schools, universities and libraries designated to receive donations. Partner NGOs include International Relief and Development in Arlington, Virginia, the Association of University Lecturers in Mosul, the Kurdistan Reconstruction Organization in Dohuk, and the Iraq Health Aid Organization in Baghdad.
Through this selection process, Sabre has coordinated shipments to seven different Iraqi institutions and their affiliates in 2009 alone. Donations have fulfilled targeted subject-area needs — like science, medicine, business and humanities. In Iraq, the University of Baghdad and nearby institutions, the University of Muthanna, the University of Kirkuk, Nahrain University, the University of Basra and the University of Mosul each received thousands of new books and CD-ROMs. Along with books, atlases, slide sets and CD-ROMs, Baghdad medical colleges also received special equipment for blind students, including 20 Perkins Braillers ( Braille typewriters ), an embosser ( a computerized Braille printer ) and boxes of Braille paper.
To fund its shipments, Sabre relies on partnerships. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad supported a number of recent shipments, Mitchell said, and International Relief and Development has helped with shipping through a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development ( USAID ). Sabre receives its own “sizable” grant from USAID to cover its ocean-freight costs, said Mitchell. The grant covers ocean shipping to Iraq, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza.
Other sources of funding for Iraq programs include the United States Institute of Peace, a Washington-based independent, nonpartisan institution supported by Congress, and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, an international law firm that began in New York and Washington. The Ministry of Higher Education of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Mosul University, and the Dhi Qar Provincial Reconstruction Team all provided support from within Iraq.
Despite the funding it has received, money has proven scarce for some projects in Iraq that Sabre hopes to complete. One such endeavor would provide textbooks for Iraqi use of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) OpenCourseWare, the online publication of nearly all of MIT’s course content. To make it possible to teach MIT courses at Iraqi universities, Harvard University partnered with Sabre to propose acquiring necessary textbooks that MIT does not offer on its Web site. To date, the project remains unfunded, writes Jeff Spurr, head of the Middle East Librarians Association’s Committee of Iraqi Libraries, in an unpublished report delivered at the association’s annual meeting at MIT November 19.
According to Spurr’s report, a group of MIT graduate students has created an organization called American Students Promoting Iraqi Education ( ASPIRE ), whose volunteers now work with Sabre to select the most crucial textbooks for “important baseline courses.” ASPIRE hopes to secure funding first for the University of Baghdad and then for other universities.
SABRE IN WEST BANK AND GAZA
Sabre’s efforts in the Middle East have also included shipments to Lebanon, and the organization now hopes to secure funding to send educational children’s books to the West Bank and Gaza.
The shipment of children’s materials would be the third supply of titles Sabre has sent to the Palestinian Territories. In 2007, Sabre sent books and CD-ROMs on science, technology and medicine, while a 2008 shipment focused on business, social sciences and the humanities. Together, the two past shipments had a value of more than $1 million.
For its work in the West Bank and Gaza, Sabre has partnered with Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, which distributes the materials among its affiliates in the territories.
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