An Assessment of Institutional Repositories in the Arab World

Compared to those of the Western world, institutional repositories from the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East have been described by scholars of the region as occupying an "infancy stage". In this article, repositories from countries in the Arab world were selected and assessed in terms of accessibility and transparency from the viewpoint of an external user. A set of assessment criteria was formed by analyzing trends and similarities in established repositories from the rest of the world, in hopes of analyzing the "infancy stage" appraisal. The results provide not only a current view of digital scholarship and institutional memory in the Middle East, but may also provide a helpful set of criteria for developing repositories for the rest of the world.