H E Sheikha Hind bint Hamad Al Thani, Vice-Chairperson and CEO of QF, at a reception at the British Library in London, to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the Qatar Digital Library launch.

The Peninsula

DOHA: H E Sheikha Hind bint Hamad Al Thani, Vice-Chairperson and CEO of Qatar Foundation, has said that everyone in the world can now access more than 1.5 million digitised pages, for free, through Qatar Digital Library, bringing the Arab and Islamic cultural and intellectual legacy to the forefront of people’s studies and understanding.

“In the four years since the Qatar Digital Library was launched through a partnership between Qatar Foundation and the British Library, we have already seen how this important resource, managed by Qatar National Library, has added value to the world’s historians and researchers, as a unified platform for collections of material that aid scholars of Qatar and the Gulf, medieval Arab science and medicine, and other spheres of study,” H E Sheikha Hind said yesterday, while addressing a reception to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the Qatar Digital Library at British Library, London.

“My mother, H H Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, Chairperson of Qatar Foundation, envisaged this partnership as a way of allowing people to look at history through fresh eyes. The Qatar Digital Library is an embodiment of that vision.”

The Qatar Digital Library this week celebrated the fourth anniversary of its launch. The bilingual website, which comprises content in both Arabic and English and provides free public access to an important range of historical collections held by the British Library, has now been visited by more than 1.2 million users, generating more than ten million pages views.

The website is the result of a partnership between QF, Qatar National Library, and the British Library to digitise historical collections relating to Gulf history and Arabic scientific manuscripts. Metadata and descriptions of the digitised items are in both Arabic and English, and the Qatar Digital Library transforms access to these collections — previously only accessible via the British Library’s reading rooms — for academics, researchers, students and the wider global community.

Initially agreed in 2012, the partnership was extended earlier this year so that a further 900,000 images will be added to the 1.5 million already available online. To celebrate the anniversary, H E Sheikha Hind, Chair of the Board of Trustees of Qatar National Library, and Dame Carol Black, Chair of the British Library Board, attended a reception last night at the British Library in London.

In advance of the reception, H E Sheikha Hind toured the digitisation studio on the sixth floor of the British Library, where Gulf-related material — including music, maps, ships’ logs, reports, letters, private papers and historic publications — is digitised, fully catalogued and uploaded onto the Qatar Digital Library.

In her speech, H E Sheikha Hind said that Qatar Digital Library is a vital resource for historians and history students writing about the Gulf — such as the University of Oxford doctoral student whose research into 19th Century British perceptions of Islam has been advanced by Qatar Digital Library documents.

“And we are just getting started. The third phase of our partnership with the British Library, which begins next year, will add almost one million further pages to the Qatar Digital Library, while material from partners in Turkey, France, the Netherlands, India, and the United Kingdom will also significantly expand its collection,” she added.

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