| المستخلص: |
For many years, libraries have been the knowledge centres and the places where you can find large amounts of data in different formats both physical and electronic. The libraries were mainly for researchers, but with the evolution of information and rapid progress of the technology that affected the library community in many aspects, libraries have extended their role to become more and more involved in the communities they serve. The evolution affected the library itself, yet the librarians, especially in the Arab region, are still behind these technologies, trying hard to cope and survive. There is a gap between the rapid progress of the technology and the qualifications of the librarians who should adopt the technologies. The data becomes so large and the formats the librarians were familiar with changed, even the librarians’ tools transformed from printed to more complicated formats. Recently, new terms were introduced to the library community, linked data and lately big data. Actually, these are not new terms, they are very popular in the information technology field, but for the librarians they are fresh and still not easy to comprehend. The research presents the main challenge that usually prevents Arab librarians from interacting with new technology; language barrier. We need translations and Arabic equivalents for the terms that occurred recently and were mainly adopted from other disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to present the actual position of the Arab libraries and librarians in the light of all these new applications. Are we as Arab librarians aware of the usability of the big data in the libraries; this research paper depends mainly on the results of a survey targeting the information service specialists in the public libraries in Egypt in an attempt to answer five main questions about their knowledge about big data.
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