Palestine Daily Newspaper, 1958

On November 11th IFLA Senior Policy Advisor Stuart Hamilton took part in the Minerva Conference in Jerusalem, Israel, alongside librarians from the Givat Haviva Peace Library, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and colleagues from the Van Leer Institute.

As a follow-up to its 2007 mission to Israel and the Occupied Territories, the FAIFE Committee has been supporting two projects to digitise Palestinian newspapers held in Givat Haviva and the Al-Aqsa Mosque library. FAIFE encouraged participants in both projects to submit a proposal for funding a small exercise in information and experience exchange, whereby the development of the Givat Haviva digitised collection would be analysed in a way that would turn the lessons learned from this case study into a platform that would serve all existing and future projects of this kind. Knowledge and experience gained at the two institutes would be shared, standards discussed and a common semantic basis built in order to avoid duplication of work in the future.
Cover page of Al-Fajr magazine, June 1, 1935

The presentations at Minerva reflected the experience of the participants, the lessons learned and the next steps. The papers were well-received by the specialist audience with plenty of questions and enquiries at the end of the session.

Presentations from the session can be found here:

 

Many thanks to Dr. Merav Mack from the Van Leer Institute for arranging the conference session, and Qasem Abu Harb, David Amitai and Samira Mahamid for their presentations.