Haneen Khader, Digital Services Specialist at QU Library, Aisha Al Abdulla, Section Head of Digital Repository and Archives, Mohamed Zalat, Digital Services Specialist at QU Library.
Qatar University (QU) initiated a project in 2014 to archive all research, faculty, and student contributions, scientific publications, and research seminars as electronic content, preserving and storing them in a digital repository for public access through the university’s website.
The Institutional Repository is maintained by the Qatar University library that captures, provides access, and ensures the long-term preservation of all collection items
.Aisha Al Abdulla, Section Head of Digital Repository and Archives at Qatar University Library, said, “The need to disseminate and freely access the institutions’ academic achievements and research activities, especially their peer-reviewed academic articles, has encouraged the experimentation of IRs. Qatar University Library plays an effective and important role in using information services and supporting electronic archiving trends. The digital repository is crucial in highlighting the academic achievements of QU.
Moreover, it is committed to providing long-term reliable access and sustainable storage to scholarly resources. In addition, it serves as a palpable factor of an institution’s productivity. Its goal is to increase the visibility of QU’s academic achievements and scientific research on a local and global scale. It emphasizes QU’s global and regional rankings, as well as its contribution to growth.”
“The digital repository’s objective is to provide reliable access to scholarly content. Qatar University’s digital repository aims to collect and archive scientific and academic content, make it accessible, and ensure its quality,” she adds.Mohamed Zalat, Digital Services Specialist at Qatar University Library, said, “Digital content published by faculty members and researchers is deposited at the university IR, as these submitted works represent their period of joining Qatar University. In addition to granting the university a non-exclusive distribution license to preserve and make their work available worldwide. The digital repository accepts all kinds of digital content such as articles, manuscripts, working papers, technical reports or conference papers, data, books, images, video and audio files, and educational materials.”
Stating the statistics, Haneen Khader, Digital Services Specialist at Qatar University Library, said, the number of research papers in the digital repository, with collections that contain academic contributions contain approximately 14,046 records, divided into 7,797 academic articles, 2,244 records produced by researchers in Qatar University research centers, and 963 records of theses and dissertations generated by QU graduate students, and 3,965 records published by QU.
She adds, “The research and academic records in the special collections, on the other hand, have 1,163 records, which are separated into the Covid-19 database, which has 244 entries, and the Qatar Blockade, which has 894 records. In addition to the 2022 World Cup collection, which is a new collection with 25 academic records.”
Noora Alwared, Distinctive Collection Metadata Specialist at QU Library, spoke about the sig-nificance of the Archival Docu-ments Project, which includes many multi-source historical documents organized into three sections; historical documents from the Ottoman Archives, his-torical documents from the Russian Archives, and additional historical documents from the Indian Archives. These archival records are valuable as they include documents and letters linked to the history of the Arabian Gulf, which allows scholars to use them in their scientific research to analyze the region’s history from a variety of perspectives.
While shedding light on the Archive project, Sara Alyafei, Planning and Coordination Specialist at QU Library, said the university’s electronic archive project was launched to document the history of the library and development of Qatar University from 1978 to the present day.
Al Yafei added: “The initiative was inspired by the relevance of the historical eras that the university has lived through, as well as the enormous amount of materials dealing with these eras that are currently unavailable in one location. The purpose of this initiative is to archive, preserve, and make available the university's historical documents to all researchers and university affiliations, who will have free access to these resources. Through the framework of Qatar University’s Digital Hub."
