ARTICLE - DIGITAL LIBRARY AT UEH

A DIGITAL LIBRARY FOR 15,000 STUDENTS OF THE UEH
(Haiti Libre) -

Libraries Without Borders (Bibliothèque Sans Frontières BSF) and the State University of Haiti (UEH) are pleased to announce the official opening, on September 30, 2011, of the first Digital Library of the State University of Haiti, a computer laboratory that will provide to the 5,000 students, researchers and professors of the UEH access to millions of electronic resources (books, periodicals, online news.).

This project was conducted in collaboration with Libraries Without Borders with the financial support of the Fondation Louis D. / Institut de France. It is an operational response to the lack of documentary resources encountered by the academic community of the UEH.

This new building with an area of ​​100m2 is built in the heart of downtown, on the site of the Faculty of Science. It meets the international anticyclonic and earthquake standards. It offers to the students, researchers and professors 60 workstations, all equipped with a broadband internet connection. Thanks to the involvement of the University of the West Indies and Guyana and to the support of more than 20 publishers and portal partners that open free access to their databases; there are millions of online resources of global excellence (virtual books, online collaborative tools, academic journals and periodicals), which will be available to the academic community of the UEH. The Digital Library will also allow train its users in online information retrieval and to develop access to new information and communication technologies.

The opening of this new service is part of a larger project conducted in close collaboration with Library Sans Frontières (BSF): the creation of a Central University Library. This project has already started with the formation of forty librarians at the UEH and, by 2013, the reception in France of 20 of them for internships. From 2012, the Central Reserve Library of UEH should become a reality and quickly offer a service of lending of books remotely for all students of the UEH. The construction of the University Library of UEH is for its part planned within 3 to 5 years.