JEDDAH: The Saudi Digital Library at the Ministry of Education announced the launch of a week-long free access initiative at the Kingdom level for 16 databases that provide digital information sources.
The step is to mark the Kingdom’s 91st National Day on Sept. 23, and is in cooperation with a number of Arab and foreign publishing houses.
The databases will be available for free for a week from Sept. 19.
All beneficiaries of library’s services are invited to access the link through the Saudi Digital Library portal.
The digital library has helped reduce the burden on the budgets of universities and government and private sectors, and this amount of digital information sources has assisted Saudis and expats residing in the Kingdom.
Among the library’s most important initiatives are the scientific theses project, the scientific journals project, a digital library project for Arabic books and a knowledge library project for students of general education.
During the COVID-19 pandemic period, the Saudi Digital Library succeeded in launching a comprehensive and free access initiative to a number of digital databases, in cooperation with a number of Arab and foreign publishing houses.
The digital library has a wide range of periodicals, tools and information bases.
According to the latest statistics, the library contains 169 international and Arab databases covering various academic disciplines, including 450,000 digital books, 60,000 scientific journals, and 9 million papers of research and conference papers.
The Library also contains 5,224,410 university theses, 3,061,669 scientific reports, 7 million multimedia materials that include scientific images and films in various disciplines, and more than 12 million scientific materials in the information assets owned by the library.
The number of beneficiaries from this Informatics gathering exceeded 65 entities and more than 300 global publishers, accessing its services through the portal on the internet in both Arabic and English.
More than 1.6 million students and postgraduate researchers have benefited from the digital library services, as have 71,000 faculty members in 55 public and private universities and colleges, more than 180,000 on scholarships, as well as 20 government agencies and institutions.
The digital library has won several awards, including the Arab Federation for Libraries and Information “I know” award for outstanding projects in the Arab world in 2010, and the Knowledge Summit Award in its fifth session from the Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Knowledge Foundation 2018 for its contribution to the transfer and dissemination of knowledge.
The Library also won the best provider of information services and resources for higher and post-secondary education at the Global Exhibition for Education Supplies and Solutions GESS 2019.
The free access initiative includes the Taylor & Francis database for millions of press articles, the Science Book Gateway database that provides reliable scholarly references in several fields and the Al-Manhal Database that provides access to thousands of digital publications from leading Arab universities, research centers and scientific communities.
Other databases in the library include ProQuest, Wiley, EBSCO, ACM, Springer Nature, Science Direct, IGI, Encyclopedia Britannica, OECD, the integrated Arabic database “Marefa,” CABI, AskZad and JOVE.
The Saudi Digital Library expressed its thanks and appreciation to the publishers who made the free service available in the Kingdom.
