Milestones: A British Library, Qatar Foundation, and Qatar National Library Partnership Make Two Millionth Image Freely Available Online

From The British Library:

Ten years ago the British Library and the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development started exploring possible areas of collaboration. For some time the British Library had been working on an international engagement strategy to make our collections more accessible in partnership with other organisations.

Fast forward to 2021, and our partnership with the Qatar Foundation and Qatar National Library has gone from strength to strength, this week hitting the major milestone of making our two millionth image freely available online via the Qatar Digital Library.

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Two million images is a nice round number, but as soon as you stop to consider how much work it is to make available such a vast amount of content, it is even more impressive – even by national library standards, it is a lot of content.

Thousands of files, manuscripts and maps have been brought up from the Library’s basements through dozens of different workflow stages in order to make them available online. Every item is checked by conservators, catalogued by archivists and content specialists, and returned by our Library Assistants. Every one of the two million pages has been foliated, copyright cleared, scanned or photographed, quality checked, processed and uploaded. A new enhanced catalogue record for every item is created and then translated into Arabic, so that the QDL is a truly bilingual resource, transforming access to these collections for researchers in the Gulf, and indeed for users around the world.

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