Establishing the Institutional Digital Repository for Almajmaah University

Undoubtedly, the Islamic true religion has passed all man-made laws since more than four centuries in calling for knowledge, but it went far beyond to prohibit concealing

knowledge. The world has realized this fact at the beginning of the nineties of the last century so conferences were held and initiatives that call for access to knowledge and the freedom of exchanging information appeared. The Budapest Initiative in 1991 was the first initiative calls for free access to information without hindrances.

From that moment, global scientific institutions created institutional digital repositories that are considered the generation after digital libraries. Institutional digital repositories are the latest institutions of digital information on the internet that provides scientific production for members of the scientific institutions on the Internet without restrictions or barriers while preserving the intellectual property rights of depositors.

The existence of an institutional digital repository for any University is considered one of the criteria for evaluating these universities in the global rankings of the best universities. Not only that, but there are global rankings of these repositories on the internet.

Digital repositories contain full texts of many forms and types of digital entities such as master's and doctorate theses, educational lectures, conferences proceedings, periodical articles, digital photos, digital video and digital audio, institution guides, plans of scientific theses and projects of students… etc.

As Deanship of Library Affairs at Almajmaah University has planned the pursuit of globality at the outset of its work, it has set among its tasks seeking to achieve "Introducing the scientific production of university employees by appropriate means". The appropriate way at the moment is create an institutional digital repository for the University wherein full text of the scientific production of the university staff.

Deanship has prepared a study for the implementation of this project through several stages since changing the culture of the society towards free access to launch the repository on the internet and assessing it.