Electronic Library Institute-seerq (elisq)

An electronic library is a computer-managed set of collections with services tailored for its user communities. The project team—a collaboration of four universities (Qatar University - QU, Virginia Tech, Pennsylvania State University, Texas A & M University), the Qatar National Library - QNL, and consultants—focused on the two project aims for Qatar: building community and building infrastructure (i.e., collections and information services). Thus we fit with Qatar's Thematic Pillar of Research on Computing and Information Technology, and overlap with a number of Research Grand Challenges (e.g., Cyber-security; Managing the Transition to a Diversified, Knowledge-based Society, and Culture, Arts, Heritage, Media and Language within the Arabic Context). With regard to our aim of building an electronic library community in Qatar, we have: 1. Participated in the Special Library Association Gulf Chapter, hosted in Qatar, to create awareness about electronic libraries; 2. Launched a consulting center at QU Library—with more than 30 new reference works, online educational resources, and specialized databases—and are sharing knowledge with librarians and information professionals to support those interested in collections and services; 3. Established a collaboration with Gulf Studies at QU, so we can identify and host content on this topic, and assist QU researchers and students; and 4. Collected citation-based and non-citation-based metrics (altmetrics), for Qatar and 35 nations that are competing with Qatar's annual scholarly production. We published a new approach for comparing the metrics and evaluating country-level scholarly impact. 5. Studied the evolving scholarly activities and needs of researchers in Qatar, and compared them with our findings from USA, informing ELISQ about requirements and solutions appropriate for international electronic libraries. With regard to our aim of building electronic library infrastructure in Qatar, we have built collections and provided related services: 1. Penn State's SeerSuite software is running at QU, allowing users to search the metadata and full-text of collections of PDF files from scholarly articles, e.g., QScience papers. SeerSuite gathers scholarly documents and automatically extracts metadata (authors, venues etc.) from crawled WWW content, allowing QNL and other libraries to harvest that metadata using OAI-PMH.. SeerSuite is being improved for searching on the content of the figures and tables in scholarly documents. 2. An historical collection of old Arabic documents has been assembled, indexed, and made accessible as well as data/text mined. 3. Using our QU server running Heritrix, gathered our first Arabic collection (8GB from 2,200 PDF files), from Qatari newspapers (Al-Rayah, Al-Watan, Qatar News Agency, Al-Arab, and Al-Sharq). This news collection was indexed with Apache Solr and is available for searching. Building upon the IPTC system we created a categorization system (taxonomy) for news stories, and then applied it through machine learning to train classifiers to aid browsing. 4. Both QNL and QU are building Web archives of portions of the WWW in Qatar, adapting Heritrix and the Wayback Machine, thus preserving history, culture, and Arabic content (including news, sports, government information, and university webpages) for future use and scholarly study.