Amal Michel Habib

Building Cultural heritage through creating scientific and environmental national databases.

Scientific research represents a sustainable human capital in the development process and a national heritage to be preserved and transmitted to future generations. It is evaluated through research publications in articles and worldwide science journals which become bibliometric indicators to rank the position of the country on the science map. Thus building bibliometric databases becomes essential not only as an evaluation tool for quality research outputs but also to trace, monitor and save the scientific & research human capital in its contribution to the development on national and international levels. In this respect, after the end of the civil war in 1990, and as Director of the information Centre of the National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS), and even when automation of information and data was still starting, a pioneer project of building a national database of research project and scientific production has been implemented, automated and put on-line on CNRS computer, even though Internet and social media were not yet available. It was the first attempt of saving and automating such national data collected on researchers, research projects and scientific publications in Lebanon, a project implemented in collaboration with UNDP and extended to international information networks through the participation to the information systems of UNITED NATIONS. Similar pioneer project implemented for Lebanon was the automation of the HERBARIUM, an inventory of national plants and flowers collected and classified by Dr Georges and Henriette Tohme who are scientific high level researchers. A database has been built with all data automated and put on line in efforts to preserve them and to make them available for the scientific community as a national environmental heritage.