Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper - First Page

“Work is progressing on the Qatar unified imaging project (QUIP), a path-breaking initiative spearheaded by a team at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, to advance knowledge of the country’s history, traditions and culture. ‘QUIP will identify and map the dispersed collections of primary source materials in Qatar, India, Britain, and Denmark and distribute selected results of the research from an open-access digital repository,’ lead principle investigator Tammi Moe told Gulf Times... QUIP envisages setting up a digital online database of up to 10,000 objects by 2014... One of the things obvious to Moe as an archivist was the difficulty at accessing primary source materials in Qatar... The breakthrough came at a symposium in February 2007 on preservation of cultural heritage. The three-day event featured all the work that the Qataris had done in the area... Moe subsequently got in touch with Hamad al-Mohannadi, the director of the Department of Heritage at the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage, and one of the main players in the effort to preserve cultural heritage in Qatar. One of the co-principle investigators, Dr James Onley (director, Gulf Studies Programme, Exeter University, UK), is documenting all the materials in the UK and India archives while Moe is covering Qatar and Denmark. Since Danish archaeologists came to Qatar in the 1950s to document the Bedouins, Denmark has a large holding about Qatar...Another co-principle investigator, Dr Sohair Wastawy, a former chief librarian at the Alexandria Library and presently the dean of libraries at the University of Illinois, will work with steering committee to develop a collection policy for the digital archiving and select up to 10,000 objects...‘This database could tell to the world the story of Qatar from an internal perspective and not from a colonialist perspective,’ Moe said...