Openness in teaching and research: Archiving Lebanese parliamentary election campaign materials

The importance of this session is to show how libraries could collaborate with faculty to enhance the curriculum through digitizing special collections and make them open access to any researcher so they could also benefit from them.

Archiving electoral materials is an important source for capturing and preserving the cultural and historical moments of the life of a country and a resource for future research and analysis. LAU Archives decided to collect and preserve this year parliamentary election advertisements.

Materials were collected from the different candidates and archived in LAUR and put open access.

Reasons behind this project:

1. Archiving the materials used for propaganda during the elections is vital. It is a unique and primary source for educators, students, and interested people. Digitizing unique special collections is a support for teaching and learning.
2. Collecting the digital copies of the electoral materials is preserving a unique collection of its kind The session will fit under “Community Idea Exchange (posters & tech showcases)”
3. Making open access this collection is allowing all students, researchers, faculty from all over the world to view and analyze a specific period of Lebanon.

The discussion will include: - How could faculty profit from digital open access collections? - How could archives/libraries collaborate with faculty to enhance the curriculum? - How could external events be analyzed and be included in the curriculum? - How to create unique digital collections: challenges and solutions