Qatar National Library (QNL) is at the forefront of providing free online resources and number of users have increased tremendously over the years.
The library has recorded 64 million interactions via digital platforms since 2017. The Digitization Center at the Library has continued to provide custom digitization projects for government institutions, citizens, museums and international cultural institutions.
While, the Library’s Digital Repository offers users worldwide free access to digitized items from Heritage Library collection, as well as some selections from local partners. The database allows researchers to browse primary source materials online providing a valuable resource for scholars of the Middle East and Islam.
There were 197,484 unique users of Digital Repository in 2021. Out of this over 19 thousand were new users, according to the Library’s Annual report for 2021. The Library is an official partner of the Arabic Collections Online project at New York University (NYU), one of the largest digital libraries of public-domain Arabic content.
The Center has digitized a total 12,961,081 pages of Arabic and non-Arabic books, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, archival documents, photos, slides, and posters by 2021.
While by end of 2018, the Digital repository has digitized 1,878,787 pages of Arabic books, 2,165,307 pages of Latin books, 56,317 manuscripts, 15,522 newspapers and 654 maps.
Also the Qatar Digital Library (QDL), a partnership between the Library, the British Library and Qatar Foundation, reached a major milestone in May 2021 with the upload of the two millionth digital image to the platform. The landmark image is of particular significance for Qatar: a letter from the British Library’s collection, written by ‘Isa bin Tārīf, the Sheikh of the Āl Bin ‘Alī tribe in 1843, to Captain Samuel Hennell, the Gulf Resident stationed at Bushehr (Bushire) on the Iranian coast.
The QDL’s contribution to research about the region has been invaluable. QDL has become one of the region’s most used digital libraries, with 297,373 unique users in 2021, bringing the total to more than two million unique users from over 165 countries and 18 territories across the globe since it was launched in 2014. With travel restricted, the QDL became a lifeline for scholars.
“QDL allows me to search hundreds of thousands of documents (many handwritten) for place names, personal names, events and topics, compressing weeks of research time into a few seconds. The ability to do this remotely, without having to visit the India Office Records in the British Library, is invaluable, especially in times of global epidemic,” Robert Carter, Professor of archaeology and a researcher of pearling in the Gulf said in the Library’s annual report.
The Library is also committed to supporting the spread of, and unrestricted access to, Qatar-based research through open access.
In 2021, the Library has supported 972 articles, by 610 authors from 21 institutes in Qatar, whose research can now be freely accessed by the global audience. This positioned Qatar as a regional leader in open access; ranking first in the region and 8th globally in publications in open access.
