Jordanian Standard Index - Department of the National Library

Introduction : Background and Justifications of the Project

The year 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The celebration of this occasion highlights the importance and accomplishment of major cultural projects that meet the level of this event.

Department of the National Library is one of the pioneering organizations for cataloging, making accessible, and preserving Jordanian intellectual output in all of its forms for users both inside and outside the Kingdom. The Higher Committee was established to discuss this matter and work with stakeholders in all Jordanian institutions to bring the Jordanian Unified Index into existence as one of the contributions of the National Library which is aware of the need to establish this Index to assist in accessing and mapping the holdings of Jordanian libraries.

The Unified Jordanian Index is defined as the index that includes all (national, academic, public, school, specialized, and private) Jordanian libraries to provide users with free access to all their bibliographic records, base files, and acquisition records of all information containers kept in these libraries.

Jordan has all kinds of libraries and information centers: The National Library, which contains publications published in Jordan and about Jordan, as well as the National Archive, including official correspondence, laws and regulations, sound recordings and national films. There are academic, public, school and specialized libraries. Most of these libraries have machine-readable or traditional indexes, and these indexes are sometimes unavailable in some libraries. These indexes may not be standard in terms of technical technology, quality or description of availability and description “Knowledge discovery.” Many big libraries contain almost repetitive library collections, whereas specialized and private libraries have individual collections regarding content or form, and may contain rare manuscripts, books, films, periodicals or university dissertations.

According to the committee’s awareness, there is not a unified index of such libraries despite the work of governmental university libraries (including 10 libraries led by the Centre of Excellence), as well as the ongoing effort of private university libraries to establish their own unified index. This does not preclude the existence of indexes of subsidiary libraries in a particular library.

Thus, establishing the Unified Jordanian Index was a celebration of the generous occasion and addressed the urgent need for researchers to determine whether the designated information resource was in Jordan and in which library. It also shows how to access an electronic register in a single bibliographic database including contents of all libraries in Jordan. There are a number of technical and professional reasons for this project, the most important ones are:

Bridging a professional and academic civilizational gap resulting from the absence of a unified national index, as in many other countries.

• Highlighting the importance of bibliographic monitoring, authority files and records of Jordanian intellectual production and its distribution in Jordanian libraries in all its forms.

• Completing the project of Unified Jordanian Index is a basic professional pillar for libraries, information centers , researchers and publishers.

• Promoting the use of international techniques (standards/practices) for knowledge management in Jordanian libraries in order to achieve universality and excellence.