Foreword: QU Press

To celebrate the 2019 International Open Access (OA) Week in collaboration with institutions from Qatar and beyond, we at Qatar University Press (QU Press) are pleased to be the publisher of this Book Sprint initiative. I want to start by thanking QU Library, represented by its Director Samia Al-Shiba, for the thoughtful approach. I equally thank all partners of this initiative for deciding to have the product available to everyone, i.e. OA. This is exactly reflecting our, as a university publishing house, commitment to raise community awareness on the importance and high impact of OA publishing.

GLAM institutions – galleries, libraries, archives and museums – promote identity and are sources of inspiration and innovation. When their data are digitized, it can be accessible to everyone. Like all labs and clinics in different fields, GLAM Labs play a pivotal role in the transformation of GLAMs. What is in our hands today is a result of what a group of sixteen experts from around the world did during this past September in Doha to produce the “Open a GLAM Lab” handbook.

The handbook answers the importance of building GLAM Labs, highlighting their vital role in changing the future of digital cultural heritage. It provides a detailed insight on the design and implementation of a Lab within the GLAM context. It also presents the benefits of a Lab to GLAMs, users, and society and highlights the qualities and skills to look for in Labs teams. The handbook also describes the procedure to ensure the sustainability of a Lab and provides insights on how to identify, access, and reuse digital collection as data and on how to transform tools into operational services.

In closing, I want to highlight that QU Press places OA at the heart of its mission, which is “to publish first-rate research and educational resources and make them accessible to all”. The Press currently hosts six peer-reviewed and OA journals in various fields, and we are planning OA programs for books as well. I wish everyone a happy reading and a successful International OA Week around this small world.