AUB University Libraries (UL) Digital Collections

The Digital Collections platform is a gateway to the University Libraries digitized and preserved collections, featuring manuscripts, maps, photos, posters, books, multimedia, and other resources. It provides access to primary source materials and preserves digital resources for the future. It also enables researchers to conduct new types of scholarship. This growing online repository aims to continuously disseminate and provide access to knowledge and valuable historical and cultural material about AUB, Lebanon, and the region for the purpose of advancing the fields of research and education. The platform serves as a hub for collaboration with other AUB departments, faculties, scholars, as well as with external partners in support of digital scholarship initiatives on and off campus.


Who We Are


Digitization Standards

We follow FADGI guidelines (Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative) for our digitized content. FADGI is a cooperative effort among experts in the field, including Library of Congress, to develop and sustain common digitization guidelines and practices for cultural heritage materials.

We aim, through digitization, to meet the digital projects or the digital collections needs by:

  • Providing access copies suitable for the web and by providing digital content that meet specific requirements needed by the digital initiatives.
  • Generating high quality digital preservation copies to facilitate long term access.


Metadata

We focus on providing core descriptive metadata to describe the intellectual entity and to facilitate discovery and access to the digital content. In order to fulfill the project or the digital collection needs, the descriptive metadata core elements is extended to include other information such as provenance and structural metadata.

Also in most of our digital collections especially the one that is unique or deemed to be long term value, we create technical and preservation metadata to ensure long term access. This information is not accessible through the digital collection platform but it is ingested along the digital items into our digital preservation system.


Digital Preservation

The number of digital items in our digital collections or used for supporting different collaborative digital initiatives is increasing tremendously. Given the fragile nature of the digital content along with the continuous evolving hardware, software, standards, and file formats, these digital materials are at a much higher preservation risk than traditional analog materials. 

We seek to provide long term access to our digital content though our evolving digital preservation framework which is essential for the Library to carry out its mission of supporting excellence in research, delivering information, and for preserving our cultural heritage.


Full Text search & OCR

We support full text search for different digital collections or whenever it is required by the digital project. The full text search, in addition to the descriptive metadata, improve search results and discovery of the content.

We also perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for the digitized content to convert the image of a scanned page into text. We are in the process of adopting new AI (Artificial Intelligence) OCR tools and methodologies to improve our OCR accuracy rate especially for the Arabic content.


Copyright and Term of Use

The AUB University Libraries (AUB UL) aims to make its collection available and easily accessible for research and scholarship. In support of this and to encourage broader discovery, the AUB University Libraries Digital Collections are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Except where otherwise stated, anyone is free to download and share works under this license as long as they give credit for the original creation, the shared work is not changed and not used for commercial purposes. Attribution should be given to "AUB University Libraries." e.g. "Campus 1967" by AUB University Libraries is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The AUB UL Digital Collections contain, link or refer also to callout content that might be protected by third-party (for which AUB UL has authorization to make available for you). Except where otherwise stated, no part of this content including digitized and converted texts, images, and any associated materials maybe sold, resold, licensed, transferred, copied or reproduced in whole or in part in any manner or in or on any media to any person without the prior written consent of AUB UL and/or the concerned third parties. AUB UL provides access to this content in its digital collections for educational, scholarly and research purposes only.

In addition, the AUB UL Digital Collections contain, link or refer to public domain material or Creative Commons Content. The AUB University Libraries do not warrant that the sharing of content, including public domain or Creative Commons content will not infringe upon the rights of third parties. It is the responsibility of the user to determine and satisfy copyright and other use conditions before copying, transmitting, or making other use of the content.


Takedown Guidelines

AUB UL provides access to content in its digital collections for educational, scholarly and research purposes only. If you are a rights holder and you are concerned that you have found material on this website for which you have not granted permission (or is not covered by a copyright exception under applicable copyright laws), you may request the removal of the material from our site by contacting us through ulcontactus@aub.edu.lb. AUB UL will look into the claim and if confirmed the reported content will be removed.

For more information or any questions, please contact us by clicking here