History of the Project
The Islamic Medical and Scientific Ethics (IMSE) collection and database started in 2009 with a grant proposal submitted to Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) to develop an information resource on this important area of research. The proposal was submitted by Doris Goldstein, former director of the Bioethics Research Library at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University – main campus in Washington DC – and Frieda Wiebe, former director of the library at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Q). The three-year project aimed to identify, collect, catalogue, and index relevant multi-lingual and multi-format resources and facilitate access to them by creating comprehensive bibliographic records within an integrated information retrieval system. The Project built on more than thirty years of experience at the Bioethics Research Library in developing focused research collections in the field of bioethics and was meant to expand the scope of existing collections to include Islamic ethical resources. By developing this collection and the searchable database, the project aimed to facilitate access to these resources for the international community of scholars and researchers. Special attention is given to Arabic resources, for which detailed citations including multiple layers of subject keywords and also translated abstracts are provided. The IMSE project became the first initiative within the larger and expanded Islamic Bioethics Project at Georgetown University in Qatar. Over the years several individuals played key roles in the development of this resource including Mohammed Ghaly (project consultant), Stefan Seeger, (Arabic language and system librarian), Joy Kahn (English resources indexer), Miriam Shaath (Arabic resources curator), and Nada Abu Hashem (Arabic resources curator).