KUWAIT: As part of its effort to maintain the intellectual and cultural heritage of Kuwait, the National Library of Kuwait launched yesterday the 'Kuwait Digital Memory' project. The program, launched on the Library's official website, aims to transfer and save a collection of various information and documents of the history of Kuwait into a digital format.

In a statement, the National Library said that the program would afford data and pictures of all the special names, dates, and events, as well as saving the material and cultural heritage of the country throughout the years. It also aims at saving and preserving the media heritage and production of Kuwait in readable, audio and visual formats, the statement added.

The library called upon the generous Kuwaiti institutions, people and families to enrich this national project with a copy of their holdings of rare documents and books for digitization. The addition of these documents will make it easier for researchers and people with heritage interest to search for any document, and save copies of them for future generations through the optical character recognition (OCR) technology.

OCR technology enables the browser to search the content with the desired word and then access the books and publications that were received in a way that facilitates the search and reading process. - KUNA