Periodicals Union Database is a joint venture of medical libraries in the Arab world. It is developed with the objective to access regionally available medical literature and to widen the scope of resource sharing between the co-operating libraries.
The SLA, round table conference held on October 25th, 2000 at Abu Dhabi, unanimously agreed to initiate a Periodicals Union Database to share resources between the medical libraries in order to facilitate Interlibrary Loan / Document Delivery services.  This project was launched on March 2001 with the journal holdings information.
 

At that time, in order to avail resource-sharing facility, the interested library must sign the ILL/DD agreement and should send their periodical holdings in Excel format through email to the HSC Library Administration (HSCLA). The union Database has 4621 journal titles from 18 co-operating medical libraries in the Arab world.
In 2003 the project was handed to WHO - EMRO Library, all participated libraries were communicating directly with World Health Organization Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean.

For more recent information about the collections of the libraries, kindly visit the related homepages.