Welcome to episode 11 of Open Culture VOICES! VOICES is a vlog series of short interviews with open GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) experts from around the world. The Open Culture Program at Creative Commons aims to promote better sharing of cultural heritage in GLAMs collections. With Open Culture VOICES, we’re thrilled to bring you various perspectives from dozens of experts speaking in many different languages on what it’s like to open up heritage content online. In this episode, we’re joined by Alwaleed Alkhaja, Senior Intellectual Property Librarian at the Qatar National Library. Alweed manages the Library’s open access fund and serves as its representative on the SCOSS Board. Before joining the Library, Alwaleed worked in open access publishing with QScience.com / HBKU Press. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the Göttingen / International Max Planck Research School, and an MBA from the Alliance Manchester Business School.

Alwaleed responds to the following questions: 

1. What are the main benefits of open GLAM?
2. What are the barriers?
3. Could you share something someone else told you that opened up your eyes and mind about open GLAM?
4. Do you have a personal message to those hesitating to open up collections?

Closed captions are available for this video, you can turn them on by clicking the CC icon at the bottom of the video. A red line will appear under the icon when closed captions have been enabled. Closed captions may be affected by Internet connectivity — if you experience a lag, we recommend watching the videos directly on YouTube.

Episodes will be released twice a week until June 2022. Missed episode ten of our Open Culture VOICES series? Catch up here >>