Digital Library Technologies

In September 27, 2013, in collaboration with the Higher Institute of Documentation (ISD) of Tunis and the Arab Federation for Libraries and Information (AFLI), a seminar on digital library technologies took place at the Amphitheatre of the ISD. The President of the Social Sciences Forum and the coordinator of the Consortium, Mrs. Amira Rouissi, had the opportunity to participate in a number of meetings on the sidelines of this regional meeting: That was an opportunity to discuss the technical aspects of the digitization of academic theses.

The first part of the seminar focused on “electronic repositories” and presented by Professor Muhammad Jafar Arif. In this regard, the participants touched upon the limitation of the Arab resources and the Arab electronic repositories. The seminar also focused on “the search and retrieval techniques in digital libraries” presented by Professor Imad Issa Saleh from King Abdul Aziz University. He made a number of observations that might be overlooked by the researcher and that could safely facilitate and speed up the process of searching for information and scientific theses on the World Wide Web.

In response to the question made by Dr.  Abdel Wahab Ben Hafaiedh about the possibility of exchanging theses with the Arab Federation for Libraries and Information (AFLI), President Hassan Surayhi explained that the matter needs partners other than the AFLI. He further explained that the Arab universities, including the Gulf universities do not see the interest in the delivering their documents to a third party, because each university is keen to provide service to its users and its name. This presents many obstacles for the possibility of cooperation.