Challenges against building FADA Birzeit University Main Library - IT Department Asad Tom 2017

University Administration The major issue was to convince the University Administration to accept the project and support it by laws and directions. For this purpose the Library director required a meeting with the UA and showed a presentation that explained the advantages of the Repository and its impact on the University visibility

Copyright Issue The University Administration had some fears and reticence from copyright issue   The Library director explained that : BZU staff can publish after embargo period It is the responsibility of the author to consider the copyright issue and not the university We start to publish at FADA the materials we own like rarebooks (70 years of publication), BZU theses and dissertations, University publications…etc.

Policies Before start working we needed to define our policies regarding what materials we will put and the rights for repository and authors, for this regard we put two policies: 1-Use Policy 2-Post Policy

Publishing on FADA? How to encourage the staff of Birzeit University to publish on FADA? For this purpose we did the following steps: 1- Held workshops for each department 2- VP Academic encouraged the staff to publish on FADA by sending them several emails and explain that FADA publications will be taken under consideration when discussing the promotions

Staff Motivation To encourage BZU staff to publish at FADA we did the following We search for their old publications and upload them on FADA Distribute brochures about FADA Made tutorial and Video on “How to Submit your publication on FADA” Team ready to support via phone and email

Technical Challenges We have no previous knowledge about DSPACE, so we start a self learning process for about two months We studied how Dspace works and do some customization( Interface and Metadata Fields) We learned how to do bulk upload and prepared the data as needed

Digitizing Problem We have no professional scanner especially for rare books, so we build a book scanner of our own. We look for suitable software to obtain the pdf from scanned images ( we found some free programs)

DATA Consolidation We faced a problem when we uploaded our users' materials from Google Scholar or Research Gate...etc. to FADA especially with the authors' names; they were entered in different forms by the different publishers so we had to unify them on FADA. Catalogers start adding the keywords, subjects, abstracts for FADA materials, and do some editing for other fields when needed.

XML Interface fada.birzeit.edu/xmlui

FADA Interface fada.birzeit.edu

Customized Fields

Standards & Metadata Tools For cataloging we follow the library of Congress Anglo-American cataloging rules AACR2 and RDA For keywords and Subjects we use the LC subject headings and “Almaknaz thesaurus”

FADA Content Full Text Publications : 1454 BZU Community: 10 (require login with BZU account) Rarebooks :323 Theses & Dissertations:801 University Publications:968 Above statistics were got on 24-8-2017

FADA Ranking in Arab World Less than a year of launching FADA, it got the 15th place in Arab World

End of Presentation Thank You