Readiness of Arab Unified Standard of Universities’ Libraries for Application in the digital environment: Evolution and experimental study on the university libraries of Sultanate of Oman

Arab Federation of Library and Information science issued the first unified
standards of the university libraries (2013). An integrated team of academicians
and professionals has been devoted for this pioneering work. We found it might
be useful to discuss this important work and examine its ability to evaluate the
performance of the Arab university libraries.
The present investigation come in two separate parts; the first part is
devoted to describe and analyze the unified Arab standards for the university
libraries, and the second one is a assigned for the application of the newly
developed approach on the university libraries of sultanate of Oman. Five
university libraries were examined including state and private universities; they
differed in size, acquisitions and staff. Qualitative approach has been adopted to
collect and analyze the required data.
Result of this work may be help in the prospective use of the newly
developed unified standards in evaluating the performance of the university Arab
libraries.
Careful reading of the unified Arab standards of the university libraries
revealed that all characteristics of the university libraries were covered. However,
some critical abbreviations should be reported as follow:
1. the introductory review of literature should be summarized to be more
concise and informative.
2. the standards should be systematically listed and arranged in a way to be
ready for application
3. equal attention should be paid to the of all measures, because some
aspects appear to be carefully examined while others were not.
4. more attention should be paid to the applied aspects than the theoretical
ones.
5. lack of the quantitative measures that essential to evaluate some
important characteristics.
6. some measures were carefully formulated but the others were not