In 2002, when the project was started, a substantial number of volunteer Kurdish computer experts took part. Unfortunately, this number shrank in the course of the time. The present situation in this area of information technology has not made any easier the contribution of all these volunteers to the digital library project, since some of them have had to leave and find work elsewhere.
Initially the project was limited to digitalising the most important works if the Institute’s library. However, after extensive discussion with the library’s users, it was agreed substantially to extend the project to the 12,000 works in 25 different languages and the thousands of documents in the Institute’s library. This updated project was planned to take 3 years to complete. Despite the technical difficulties encountered, as well as the reduction in the number of volunteers, a considerable amount of work on the Digital Library project was achieved by 2002. The Digital Library’s database was designed in MySql. The setting up of this database is finished and it can now accept monographs. A substantial amount of digitalisation has already been carried out: all the monthly Information Bulletins published by the Institute from July 1983 to August 2010 have been digitalised. To date, these Bulletins represent over 300 issues, making a total of 50,000 pages.
