"Partners in Knowledge"

A project full of workshops and training seminars.

NA launches an internal training and educational project, relying on its own cadres.


The National Archives of the UAE has launched it new training project "Partners in Knowledge".  The core of this strategic program is self-sufficiency, relying on NA's specialized employees who have expertise, and skilled in their fields.  The project offers a wealth of workshops and training sessions, involving several topics, related to NA and its areas of work.  The new project is a conduit for passing work expertise via employee-to-employee.  It aims at informing all NA employees of all services provided by other employees within the same organization.  All employees will share knowledge and experiences.

The project reflects NA vision that human resources is essential to the process of production and achievement.  Training is known to have a vital role in improving employees' skills and abilities, and increasing their productivity.  Employees would be enriched with the knowledge needed to achieve their professional targets, will help polish their skills, and update their innovative skills, as they will be exposed to most modern and updated work methods.

This training project will help curtail high costs of external training needs.  The project will also ensure employees' commitment to training, and participants will gain certificates of completion.  This process in itself improves performance quality, thus job efficiency.

This project has led to a series of training workshops and educational seminars, as all training and meeting rooms within NA are always busy.  More and more employees are participating in the training workshops offered, such as Scientific Research Methodology, encompassing characteristics of scientific research, clear research title and content, relevant facts, characteristics of the researchers, such as researchers' interest in the topic, patience, critique talent, and well-rounded education. The same training focus on the importance of researching the specific topic, and offering solutions, in addition to essential recommendations prior to beginning the research process.  Other topics discussed are the value of the research topic, steps of the research process, defining methodology, writing methods, and finally listing credits and documenting resources.

One of the project's activities is a training course on "Electronic Archiving".  The training offered participants an introduction to electronic archiving as being a system that encompasses a number of methods, technologies, and modern applications and techniques utilized in archiving.  The training session also discussed the objectives of electronic archiving, types of electronic documents, electronic archiving process chain, types of scanners and how each works, document scanning followed by indexing and entry of metadata, conserving and storing electronic documents, storage types and containers, and methods of research and retrieving electronic documents.

A training session entitled: "scattered archives, and how to properly and scientifically process it”, discussed provisions of Law No. 7, of 2008, related to NA, which details the importance of historical documents and archives.  The session defined "a document" and discussed the state of "scattered archives".  The trainer presented sample photographs of "scattered archives" and spoke at length about the process of organizing such archives. The trainer then displayed photographs of ideal archives. 

One of the most important training sessions offered by this project was entitled "The Art of Etiquette and Rules of Protocol". In this training, participants received information on etiquette, its definition and its relevance to Islam.  Some of the topics discussed were the etiquette of: handshaking, VIP visits, applauding, and dinning.  The trainer then talked about the definition of Protocol, including international protocol, saluting the flag protocol, the county's emblem, pictures of officials, techniques of dealing with visiting delegations.  The session was concluded with the topic on situations that conflict with rules of etiquette and protocol.

Another important training session offered by the program was entitled: "Archives Document Categorizing Plan & Application".  The session dealt with the importance of categorizing and the scope of its application, as well as its advantages and responsibilities.  The session participants then received information on encoding, and categorizing of internal correspondences and hard copy files.  The participants were then given examples of different categorization plans. 

The "Film Pictures" training forum discussed the importance of sustainable archival pictures, means of conserving them for long-term archiving, to make them available as historical documents.  The forum focused on cinematic and photographic pictures technology and techniques, in addition to conserving pictures digitally.

The project included a "Languages Common Mistakes" lecture, shedding light on a huge number of common mistakes used by employees.

The lecture on "Documenting UAE Local News" gathered from local newspapers, focused on the significance of documentation.  The lecturer then outlined the efforts of Modern Documentation Section, and process of selecting and documenting "news".

"Partners in Knowledge" also included a training workshop on the "Conversion & Destruction" of document.  Participants learned the definition of "Conversion" as transferring documents and files that are no longer used, from their location at the workplace, to the Documents Unit, based on the provision of the Law and its Executive Bylaws.  The workshop discussed steps of relocation, and defined the “destruction of documents” as being a series of procedures taken by government agencies to get rid of documents useless to scientific and historical research.