Building a networked consortial resource sharing in UAE : opportunities and challenges

Author

al-Hefeiti, Abd Allah Khalifah

Source

المؤتمر التاسع عشر للاتحاد العربي للمكتبات و المعلومات (اعلم) : التعاون بين مؤسسات و مرافق المعلومات العربية في عصر الرقمنة، القاهرة (مصر) 24-26 نوفمبر 2008.

Publisher

Arab Federation for Libraries and Information

Publication Date

2008-11-30

Country of Publication

Tunisia

No. of Pages

8

Main Subjects

Library Sciences

Topics

• Conferences
• United Arab Emirates
• Information technology
• Academic libraries

English Abstract

One of the most significant challenges facing academic and research libraries nowadays is responding to the new information technologies (IT) while graduating from their traditional role to enterprising e-information disseminators and scholarly knowledge distributors.

Two IT developments have significantly changed the pattern of academic library functions iemergence of contents (metadata) standards (MARC21, Dublin core, etc.), and ii- ubiquitous invasion of the Web-based applications and artificial intelligent (AI) systems.

However, the phenomenal explosion of the digital information has raised basic questions that concerned with the capabilities of the academic libraries in providing reliable scholarly information competing with those cast over the Web.

The proliferation of the higher education and research activities throughout the world has triggered off the element of concern for creating a kind of library cooperation purposely for providing cost-effective sharing in acquisitions of, and access to both printed and electronic resources.

This paper aims at gaining some insights into motives and opportunities for building a networked consortium of academic libraries in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Three higher institutions (High Colleges of Technology, UAE University, and Zayed University) established a circulation consortium LIWA, which is effective since 2007.

LIWA is used as a case study to diagnose strength; weakness, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of the key pre-initiative issues of interlibrary cooperation that could be related to the birth of forthcoming academic library consortia such as union web-OPAC, technical service standards, acquisitions budget, copyright, licensing, staffing, access security, etc.

Data Type

Conference Papers

Record ID

BIM-375579

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