How a Digital Library Can Revive Arabic Chronicles in Greece?

Greece, a crossroads of civilizations for millennia, still lacks a national digital repository for Arabic sources from the 8th to 16th centuries. This gap hampers Greek scholars studying Arab and Islamic history, leaving room for overly Eurocentric narratives. To fill the void, the Hellenic Digital Library of Arabic Historical Sources (HDB‑AHS) is proposed: a trilingual (Greek‑English‑Arabic) platform that will gather, preserve, and freely share chronicles, diplomatic letters, and travel diaries. The project follows six phases: digitisation using IIIF standards, text encoding in TEI‑XML, adoption of FAIR principles for interoperability and CARE for community respect, and open licensing with a rights‑clearance system. Beyond boosting academic research, the digital library aims to become a cultural bridge, providing concrete tools to fight intolerance and promote dialogue between civilizations. If successful, it could inspire similar initiatives in under‑represented fields, showing how technology can link past and future to build a more inclusive society.

The HDB‑AHS project relies on a modular architecture that integrates IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) for high‑resolution viewing of manuscripts and maps, allowing users to zoom into minute details such as calligraphy or marginal notes. Texts will be encoded in TEI‑XML (Text Encoding Initiative), an international standard that enables structural description of elements like titles, footnotes, bibliographic references, and textual variants, facilitating computational analysis and data mining. Interoperability is ensured by FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable): metadata will be published in RDF/OWL schemas, making resources indexable by academic search engines. Simultaneously, CARE principles (Collective Benefit, Authority, Responsibility, Ethics) will be applied to manage sensitive content, for example diplomatic letters dealing with tribal or religious issues, ensuring source communities retain decision‑making roles. For rights management, the project adopts a clearance framework that combines Creative Commons licenses (CC‑BY‑SA) for public‑domain materials with specific licensing agreements for still‑copyrighted works. Additionally, a Git‑LFS based versioning system will track edits and contributor inputs, guaranteeing transparency and accountability. The cloud infrastructure, hosted on European servers certified ISO/IEC 27001, ensures long‑term preservation and resilience against data loss. Finally, the platform will provide RESTful APIs for programmatic access, enabling researchers to develop textual analysis tools, diplomatic network visualisations, and thematic maps, opening new interdisciplinary research horizons.