MELCOM (U.K.)

Minutes of the 74th Meeting held at Durham University Library on Wednesday
14th September, 2005.

The meeting was preceded by the Sixth Pearson Memorial Lecture delivered by
Peter Colvin with the title of "The British discovery of Afghanistan:
Mountstuart Elphinstone and his contribution to British-Indian Orientalism"


Present
Ahmed Abu Zayed			Exeter
Dominique Akhoun-Schwarb	SOAS
Ines Asceric-Todd			Durham

Paul Auchterlonie			Exeter
Jasmine Ansari			Al-Furqan	
Heather Bleaney			SOAS
Omar Cachouh			Al-Furqan
Simonetta Calderini		Roehampton
Humayra Ceylan			Markfield
Peter Colvin			SOAS
Delia Cortese			Middlesex 
Derek Hopwood			Oxford
Nadeem El-Issa			Joppa
Meline Neilsen			Birmingham
Eric Ormsby				Institute of Ismaili Studies
Maureen Pinder 			Leeds
Daphne Roper			Adab Books
Geoffrey Roper			Instititute for Study of Muslim
Civilizations
Stefan Seeger			Instititute for Study of Muslim
Civilizations
Davidson MacLaren			Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation

Mamtimyn Sunuodula		Durham
MuhammadIsa Waley			B.L.


1.	Apologies for absence
 Colin Baker,  Debby Cox, Mastan Ebtehaj, Waleed El-Shobaki, Yasmin Faghihi,
Anne Poulson, Colin Wakefield. 

2.	Minutes of previous meeting and matters arising
Corrections: item 8, should be Sondersammelgebiet; item 10:British Library:
the Suleymaniye Library is working towards being able to provide a CD copy
of manuscripts on the day following an order.
The Islamic College at Markfield was wrongly reported as having Persian
books in its catalogue that were catalogued in Persian script.  The three
languages covered are in fact English, Arabic and Urdu.

Derek Hopwood gave an account of the contribution of Derek Latham who had
recently died to the early years of MELCOM UK.
He had worked in the Library of Stamford University and then in Manchester
University Library, subsequently becoming a lecturer in Arabic at Manchester
University and finally Professor of Arabic at Edinburgh University. He had
been considered by many to be the best Arabist of his generation. He had
been part of MELCOM from the beginning when each institution was represented
by two members, an academic and a librarian. He had been the Chairman for
many years. Paul had written to Mrs Latham expressing the sympathy of the
Committee.



	
3.	Accounts (Nadeem el-Issa)
The accounts were reported as follows:
Current account:  £1392.19
Reserve account: £2264.36

It was agreed to transfer £500 to the reserve account.

4.	Maureen Pinder reported on the one-day conference on Collaborative
Collection Management and Foreign Language Collections, held at the British
Library on 11th April 2005. The conference was well attended, with 88 people
from 44 different institutions. Besides Maureen who is a member of Coseelis
as well as MELCOM UK, the Chairman and the Secretary and Mamtymin were
present.
The conference heard about the national context for collaboration and the
experience of CURL-CoFoR’s project which has committed 18 libraries to
collect in specific areas for ten years, exchange of information on their
collection strengths and the transfer of materials between libraries
accordingly.
The experiences of different groups were compared, as were the obstacles
encountered which included lack of volunteer time, lack of funding, the
range of languages and duties covered.
Apart from the general agreement on the desirability of cooperation and
needs to encourage it, and for other groups to follow the example of
CURL-CoFoR, it was recommended that there was further need for identifying
and prioritising work on collection mapping.
The Chairman pointed out that while the Mapping Asia project existed and was
useful it was no longer being added to, and was probably not being used as
much as it should.  It would be highly desirable for a complete list of the
strengths of all university libraries with regional and language collections
to be made available uniting all the various projects, though it would be
difficult given the differences between the various mapping projects.
Moreover there remained the major difficulty of getting users to visit
collections with major strengths, like Exeter or Durham, when these are
outside the London region.
 
5.	Dominique Akhoun-Schwarb reported on the Manuscript Conference.
“The Islamic Manuscript Conference was held at King’s College, the
University of Cambridge from 4h to 6th July 2005 under the auspices of the
Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation.
The aim of that conference actually was to create an association of people
interested in the preservation and study of Islamic manuscript around the
world, to ultimately improve access to those manuscripts to scholars around
the world and hence enhance the knowledge of the Islamic civilization. 
As it is, scholars working on manuscripts face a number of problems:
non-existent or outdated catalogues, poor conservation conditions, problems
of accessibility. On the other hand, many libraries do not have the required
funds or expertise to both properly catalogue and conserve their manuscripts
collections. 
So, facing this challenge, the Islamic Manuscript Association aims at:
1- assessing the current state of Islamic manuscripts by locating and
identifying them,
2- exploring how modern technologies in general and digitisation in
particular can assist in the conservation of manuscripts, render them more
accessible to scholars and offer new tools for codicology and textual
criticism,
3- and last but not least, it would aim at standardizing the rules of
manuscripts cataloguing. 
A further aim of this association is to assist its member institutions in
fundraising for projects central to its work.  
In the short term, this association intends to publish a new scholarly
journal, where the papers of the first conference should appear. This
publication would provide information about current projects, as well as a
forum where anyone interested in manuscripts and transmission of knowledge
could contribute. 
 There was a strong representation of Indian, Turkish and English libraries.
The working languages of the conference were Arabic, English, Persian and
Turkish. Translators ensured that everybody could follow all the
discussions.
Because the conference was convened at short notice, many institutions could
not attend. Therefore, there was not a fair representation of all the
institutions dealing with Islamic manuscripts in the world. 
Nonetheless some absences were more problematic than others. There was for
example nobody representing the many European institutions already running
projects in that field and which would have been interested in sharing their
experience. It seems that a first step to standardisation should be to
monitor those different projects abroad and try to gather the existing
forces rather than trying to create something ex-nihilo. 
Perhaps not enough attention was paid to the lack of standard mss
cataloguing rules, but it is a problem that is certainly on the agenda of
this association and we are all really looking forward to seeing an
international committee working on this matter.  
Another point which would have been worth being considered a bit more is the
attitude of academics towards open-sourcing theirs works. If librarians and
IT professionals tend in general to favour open-sourcing, (facilitating free
access to sources, grey literature, etc.), it is not so clear if academics
would so gladly adhere to the idea; and if we want this project to progress,
we have to tackle this issue beforehand.

In spite of these reservations, it was a well organised conference in the
sense that it gave a glimpse at various types of libraries of diverse size
and with diverse approaches to the management of their manuscripts
collections, but it also gave a taste of what could be done in terms of
conservation, digitisation and dissemination, through the examples of some
successful projects.

6.	Pearson Memorial Lecture
Peter Colvin said he would not be publishing his lecture in its present
form.
The speaker for the seventh Pearson Memorial Lecture had not yet been
agreed.

7. MELCOM International Conference

“The 27th MELCOM International Conference took place in the Conference
Centre of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria from 23-25 May and was
organised by colleagues from the Manuscripts Department.
Over 80 participants registered for the conference. There were 14
nationalities, mostly from Europe, with Czech and Bosnian colleagues
participating for the first time, and also from Australia, Egypt, Lebanon,
Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and USA. Many guests attended one or two sessions
only. We were there when Mrs Laura Bush visited the Bibliotheca. (We only
saw the red carpets). The security situation meant that the public were not
allowed in. As a result that morning many staff of the Bibliotheca attended
our conference instead. 
The programme was varied as usual, e.g. papers included the subjects of
manuscripts, cataloguing policies and practices, libraries in the Arab World
and international cooperation, digitisation of manuscripts, IT and
electronic publishing and libraries and new technologies. Appropriate papers
will be published on the MELCOM Int. website. I gave a presentation on the
Illuminating Faith project, outlining the project aims, planning and
management procedures, and exhibition planning and installation. Images of
objects and gallery shots were included in the presentation.
The conference ended with guided tours of the Bibliotheca; the manuscripts
library, the conservation unit, the manuscripts museum and antiquities
museum; followed by a reception at the Swedish Institute in Alexandria which
is concerned with developing Euro-Mediterranean partnerships. 
Evaluation of the conference suggested a very successful conference, in an
outstanding venue. 

Meline Nielsen (Treasurer for the last six years)

8.	BRISMES Council
Ian Netton would be asked to report to the next meeting by e-mail.


9.	Developments in member libraries and reports on periodicals

Birmingham
Meline’s exhibition has been extended from June to the 2nd December.
Geoffrey Roper wrote an evaluation. Any ideas on how to build on its success
would be welcomed. The Mingana Collection has applied for MLA designation.
It is eligible as a collection of international importance, but the fact
that its catalogue is not on the internet may act against it.
There will be a “St Mingana Symposium” on the bible in Arab Christianity

Cambridge
Cambridge University Library has moved to the Unicode version of Voyager and
can now do dual script cataloguing and display. Yasmin Faghihi has no
additional assistance anymore as funding has stopped. She won't be attending
the MELCOM International next year but will hopefully have more news on
Manuscript cataloguing by then.  

Thesaurus Islamicus Foundation (Cairo and Cambridge.)
Davidson MacLaren reported on the background to the Thesaurus Islamicus
Foundation and its activities in addition to the Conference on Manuscripts
held in Cambridge that was reported on above.

Durham
Mamtimyn introduced Ines Asceric-Todd who is a Temporary Assistant
Librarian, Middle Eastern Collection, and is cataloguing Ottoman items.

Exeter
Nothing to report from ADU. There is a new course on information literacy
with an interactive manual. 

Leeds
The new librarian is Margaret Coutts from the University of Kent

Leicester-Markfield
Markfield Institute of Higher Education.
The cataloguing of the Urdu books with the original script in the records
has been completed with the help of a grant from the British Library. The
Library is applying to become a member of the LAILLAR (Libraries Agreement
in Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland) Scheme and is seeking to get more
readers. It has acquired the reprint editions of The Crescent and The
Islamic World edited by William Quilliam in hardcopy and on CD-ROM.

London

Delia Cortese of Middlesex University and Simonetta Calderini of Roehampton
University reported on their book “Women and the Fatimids n the World of
Islam” which would shortly be published by Edinburgh University Press.



British Library
Waseem Farooq has left to join the Institute for the Study of Muslim
Civilizations.
Colin Baker will be asked to report on the nature of the gift to the Iraqi
National Library that was reported in the press.

Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations.
Stefan Seeger was welcomed to his first MELCOM UK meeting. He and Waseem
Farooq have both joined the Library since the last meeting. Geoffrey Roper
reported on the annotated bibliography project which aims to present
keyworks in all academic fields in the vernacular languages of Islamic
countries. The library would welcome visitors and will open on request.
Research on the software for the catalogue is taking place and the choice
has alighted on Liberty 3. The aim of the library, besides fulfilling the
needs of its students, is to attempt to fill in gaps in the holdings of
other London collections, rather than duplicate items. 

Geoffrey also reported that a conference on Printing and publishing in the
Middle East would be held at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris from 2-5
November.
Geoffrey will be editing the “Oxford companion to the book” which is due to
be published in two years. 

Institute of Ismaili Studies.
The new Librarian of the Institute, Professor Erik Ormsby was also attending
his first MELCOM meeting and was welcomed.

Al-Furqan Islamic Institute Library
Jasmine Ansari reported that she was still settling into the job as
Librarian.

SOAS Library
The Secretary reported that there had been a very strong reaction to the
forced redundancy of the Japanese and Chinese subject librarians from the
AUT, SOAS academics, and an international campaign in their defence had also
ensued.

10.	Any other business
There was no other business

11.	Date and place of next meeting
The next meeting will be on Wednesday 11th January 2006 in the Institute of
Ismaili Studies.