Ma’lesh, bear with me a bit more because I want to boast about the content that This Week in Palestine magazine (or platform, if you will) has published over the past couple of decades.
A few days ago, a woman who authored an article that was published in the October 2010 issue (#150) asked me for a link to her article which was about the East Jerusalem Hospital Network. I informed her that it wouldn’t be possible at the moment because we have opened up our entire archive in order to categorize the articles. We’re going backwards and are currently working on the year 2017. Since I have the print edition of our almost 300 issues, I sent her an image of her article, which semi-satisfied her!
But when I looked at issue #150, which incidentally was on health, I felt gratified, humbled, and proud. The edition included articles that covered topics such as the right to health, holistic health and alternative medicine, access to health, health reform, nutritional status and dietary habits among adolescents, the national health insurance system, mental health, thalassemia, and maybe eight more articles with health-related themes. The names of the people and institutions who had authored the articles were also impressive. Big names in health, to put it mildly. I did warn you that I would boast about TWiP’s content!
When I hit the “Access TWiP’s Archive” banner (which I can see, but you can’t…yet), I get a screen with options to access a certain issue, articles by a certain author, and of course, all the articles published on a particular topic. There are roughly 80 topics or categories to choose from. Tapping on “culture,” for instance, will now result in a list of 40 articles, each appearing with a large photo and a paragraph from that article. Once we have completed tagging or categorizing our archives, that list will probably grow to 200 articles, and I’m being conservative here.
Very soon, we will open our archive for all to see and, we hope, subscribe to. At some point, access to most of the content will only be available by subscription. I would love to make our thousands of articles free to all, but our resources simply won’t allow that. Yes, we do consider TWiP to be a mission, but as our editor once said, “Even missions need funding!”
On a personal note, I finally see a dream being realized, and I’m relieved that the content we have been providing for so long will finally be stored in a safe place where people can make use of it. This archive can potentially enable all Palestinians to delve deeply into multiple facets of their motherland and make them proud. Non-Palestinians (friends or foes) – as well as academic institutions, school students, heck, even Joe Biden (who croaked “I am a Zionist”) – could and should also be offered this type of access to the richness of Palestine.
With the search engine becoming a reality, This Week in Palestine can proudly and finally claim to be a source of credible information on Palestine.
Thank you for your support, and long live Palestine!
By Sani Meo
Publisher
