Since the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century, the amount of printed text has grown overwhelmingly. This led to the existence of large collections of legacy books available only in print. Many recent initiatives, such as the Million Book Project, have focused on digitizing large repositories of legacy books (Barret et al., 2004; Lin, 2006; Simske and Lin, 2004). Such initiatives have been successful in digitizing millions of books in a variety of languages , , , , including Arabic . Although much of the initial focus has been on the preservation and archiving of these books, the focus has steadily grown to include content related services pertaining to how users can access and use the digitize content. The most prominent of such services has been search, which has been enabled by optical character recognition, which transforms document images to text. Search allows users to find books of interest and perhaps pages or paragraphs of interest. Despite the existence of search, digitized books continue to be unattractive to many users. Other services are still required to enable the effective use of digitized books and to make books more accessible and alluring to users.

In this paper, we identify possible services being explored at CMIC that would improve the accessibility and usability of digitized books. The services revolve around visualization, navigation, and recommendation, which are covered in sections 2, 3, and 4 respectively.

The term social media has been used to define the creation of content in variety of forms that integrate technology and social interaction. The content, and subsequent means of presentation, depends on the ways communities agree to share information and understanding. The core difference between social media and traditional media is the integration of interaction amongst users in the content creation process , which uses technology that allows such interaction. Social media takes a variety of different forms, including wikis, weblogs (blogs), online discussion forums, and text and multimedia content sharing. Amongst the most popular social media applications are Wikipedia, Facebook, blogspot, YouTube, Windows Live Spaces and Flickr to name only a few. Currently, social media accounts for a significant portion of the content growth that we are currently witnessing. As a matter of fact, social media is quickly overshadowing the content created through “traditional” media.

The Microsoft Innovation Laboratory in Cairo (CMIC) has been positioned at the forefront of supporting the growth of a healthy social media ecosystem, with a particular focus on the Arab world. Through a variety of tools and applications, CMIC aims to help users in cyberspace understand, consume and participate in social media to expand the amount of Arabic content available.

Creating, sharing, servicing, and preserving MM content in digital formats in the Arabic region face a number of hurdles that need to be addressed. First, the PC penetration and level of Internet literacy, although growing, continues to be inappropriately low. Furthermore, there is a shortage in the number of organizations/institutions creating digital MM content. Collaborative efforts from the more digitally aware and tech savvy individuals and organizations in the region in producing MM content would play a significant role. This could be modeled around existing collaborative environments, such as Wikipedia and YouTube, to support the growth of digital Arabic MM content.

Another major obstacle for the growth of digital MM content is the lack of tools and services that would enable users to access and find information with relative ease. This factor presents itself as both an obstacle and an opportunity. The creation of useful services will accelerate the creation of relevant content and vice-versa.

CMIC is currently engaged in research efforts aiming at easing the indexing, browsing, and searching of MM content. Last, but not least, internet access and bandwidth constraints limit the publishing and consumption of digital MM content. This is especially true when using portable publishing devices, such as cell phones, which are widely spread and abundant in the Arab region. Such platforms suffer from limited connectivity resources. Research opportunities under this limited resources environment include devising efficient and effective methods for decreasing bandwidth utilization through efficient MM compression, summarization, and repurposing. In CMIC, we are currently pursuing a number of ideas related to MM summarization in domains such as education and personal videos.

The creation of these services and tools can significantly increase online digital MM content, particularly in the Arab region.