Over the past year I have been project managing the content workstream of the British Library’s flagship digitisation programme with the Qatar Foundation, now launched and live on a bilingual free-to-use portal at www.qdl.qa.

This service offers a unique resource on the history of the Gulf region, drawing on primary collections at the British Library including the India Office Records, visual arts, digitised sound collections and the maps collections. You can learn more at www.qdl.qa/en/about.

My interest in this session is to riff with some digital tools proposed by the group for enriching the content without any further development to the portal. For example, that might mean:

• Developing learning resources with a tool like Creativist.com
• Drawing on the published contextual articles (see www.qdl.qa/en/articles-from-our-experts) to produce a Prezi.com
• Creating archives of transcriptions and translations of source material (www.qdl.qa/en/search/site/?f%5B0%5D=document_source%3Aarchive_source)
• Creating new collections of key content using a service like Diigo, Pinterest, Evernote or Delicious
• Mapping key pages on a digital maps service
• Extracting data from tables and charts to produce visualisations of issues like the history of slavery or trade
• Constructing bi-lingual dialogues between Arabic and English speakers on key topics on Twitter or elsewhere, using multi-lingual translation services , such as Transfluent.com or www.flitto.com/

Or many other ideas besides. I do hope you’ll join and contribute. Here’s a video to help you decide: