Qatar Digital Library (QDL) is a bilingual online library which was launched as a joint venture by a partnership consisting of Qatar Foundation, Qatar National Library and the British Library in October 2014. QDL comprises one of the largest online collections of historic records on the Persian Gulf countries. [1]
Qatar Digital Library was first announced in 2012. [2] The starting budget was reported as £8.7 million. [3] The partnership sought to digitize a rich trove of heritage material documenting Arab and Islamic history and to make it freely accessible to the public through the QDL, which was launched online in October 2014. [4] The launch of the QDL's website marked the first phase of its launch. On 19 January 2015, the second phase of the QDL was commenced and is expected to last until December 2018. The second phase will witness the digitization of 1,125,000 pages of historical documents. [2]
The website was designed and built by Cogapp. [5] It has won multiple awards. [6] [7]
The digital library, with an English and Arabic bilingual interface, encompasses a total of 500,000 pages of items held by the British Library pertaining to the history of the Persian Gulf region. Some 475,000 pages, dating from the mid 18th century to 1951, are from the India Office Records and Private Papers (including the archives of the East India Company and its successor institutions); and 25,000 pages are of medieval and modern Arabic and English manuscripts. [8] [9] Among the pages are numerous photographs, maps, and drawings. [10]
The British Library and QNL will both hold copies of the digital collection; however, after the completion of the digitization (originally estimated as the end of 2014), the QNL will assume responsibility for the hosting and further development of the QDL portal. [8] [9]
The British Library’s collection contains over 500 Arabic scientific manuscripts, of which 205 were digitalised in the first two phases of the project. [11] [12] The first phase included manuscripts from Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Aristotle, as well as Theodosius of Bithynia. [11] The second phase was completed in July 2019 and consisted of 125 manuscripts. [12] [13]
As of 2021, 2 million pages of historical and cultural heritage materials were digitalized in the QDL. Since the QDL began in 2014 there were more than 1.9 million users registered worldwide. [14]
Oman, officially the Sultanate of Oman, is a country in West Asia. It is located on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and overlooks the mouth of the Persian Gulf. It shares land borders with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, while sharing maritime borders with Iran and Pakistan. The capital and largest city is Muscat. Oman has a population of nearly 4.7 million and is the 124th most-populous country. The coast faces the Arabian Sea on the southeast, and the Gulf of Oman on the northeast. The Madha and Musandam exclaves are surrounded by United Arab Emirates on their land borders, with the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman forming Musandam's coastal boundaries.
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) is a major library and cultural center on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea in Alexandria, Egypt. It is a commemoration of the Library of Alexandria, once one of the largest libraries worldwide, which was lost in antiquity. The idea of reviving the old library dates back to 1974 when a committee set up by Alexandria University selected a plot of land for its new library. Construction work began in 1995, and after some US$220 million had been spent, the complex was officially inaugurated on 16 October 2002. In 2009, the library received a donation of 500,000 books from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). The gift makes the Bibliotheca Alexandrina the sixth-largest Francophone library in the world.
Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development is a state-led non-profit organization in Qatar, founded in 1995 by then-emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and his second wife Moza bint Nasser Al-Missned.
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Trove is an Australian online library database owned by the National Library of Australia in which it holds partnerships with source providers National and State Libraries Australia, an aggregator and service which includes full text documents, digital images, bibliographic and holdings data of items which are not available digitally, and a free faceted-search engine as a discovery tool.
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