On 29,30 April, Ostour  – in collaboration with the Department of History at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies – held a seminar titled Arab Historians And Their Sources in Doha, Qatar, with the participation of academics from various Arab universities. The seminar considered four main themes and two case studies. The first theme was archive experiences, the importance and difficulties of working out how to approach the archive and the importance of foreign archives to studying many topics in Arab history. The second theme was the variety of sources available to historians. The third theme was modern history. The fourth theme was otherness and sources, within which participants touched on … and travel becomes a source for writing the history of the other. The first case study was Ottoman sources and how Arab historians have approached them. The second case study was the history of Palestine. Here researchers discussed historians and researchers' approaches to sources in the history of Palestine in various periods and within various fields of study. In this issue part one of the proceedings of the seminar are made available, discussing Arab historians' experiences with the archive. Further parts will be published in later issues of Ostour.