Leveraging the Internet to Rebuild the Civil Infrastructure of Iraq.

The Iraqi educational and scientific infrastructure is in disarray. Thirty years of neglect by an oppressive regime compounded with looting have left Iraqi scientists, physicians, engineers, and students without many of the basic resources they require to rebuild their country.

A team of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellows at the Departments of Defense and State has led the way in developing an initiative to modernize Iraqi libraries. The team has leveraged the active support and $360,000 in seed money from the Advanced Systems Concept Office in the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) to develop a Web portal — the Iraqi Virtual Science Library (IVSL) — that allows Iraqi engineers and scientists to easily and safely access key information necessary in the Iraq rebuilding effort.

Consulting with Sun Microsystems and others, the team of scientists was able to build a strong public/private partnership for the digital library. The first phase of the portal is now complete and Iraqi scientists, engineers, physicians, and students across the country can access more than 1 million articles from 17,000 journal titles from leading scientific publishers including The American Chemical Society, The American Institute of Physics, The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and the American Society for Civil Engineering, to name a few. The portal also provides access to online courses, funding and research opportunities, and other tools necessary to find the information they will need to rebuild the country and the scientific community.