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

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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 s and explain that FADA publications will be taken under consideration when discussing the promotions

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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)

9. 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.

10. XML Interface
fada.birzeit.edu/xmlui

11. FADA Interface
fada.birzeit.edu

12. Customized Fields

13. 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”

14. 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

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

16. End of Presentation
Thank You