The European Association of Middle Eastern Studies (EURAMES), last week held a
successful third triennial conference in Gent, Belgium. (The first was in
Coventry, 1993, the second in Aix-en-Provence, 1996.) During it the EURAMES
Council was reconstituted, and a new President was elected: Prof. Guenter Meyer
of the University of Mainz.
Prof. Meyer has already announced a number of new proposals for
strengthening the organisation and role of EURAMES, and among them is the
setting up of Working Groups "to create interdisciplinary and international
research networks of scholars who are interested in the same subject of
research in the Middle East". These will "exchange information on current
research projects, organise new projects, find partners from other European
countries to apply for EU grants, coordinate panels for conferences, and select
contributions for journals or edited books". Each will have its own web page
linked to the EURAMES site.
I suggest that one of these Groups should be on librarianship and
bibliography (in the broadest sense) and that it should be an arm of MELCOM
International. I should be interested to hear what colleagues think of this,
and what role they could play in it. The prospect of EU or other funding for
cooperative projects, under EURAMES auspices, should provide an incentive for
us.
The next EURAMES Conference will be in Mainz in 2002, possibly with
American and other non-European participation in collaboration with MESA. As
Mainz is the city of Gutenberg (and home of the Gutenberg-Museum), why don't we
propose a panel on the history of Middle Eastern books and printing, to be
coordinated by MELCOM International? This would be quite timely, as the future
of the printed word is becoming a subject of considerable debate and
speculation, in the Middle East as elsewhere.
Further information on EURAMES can be found at
http://www.hf.uib.no/institutter/smi/eurames
but at the present moment it has yet to be updated following the Gent
conference and the ensuing personnel and contact changes.
Geoffrey Roper
Islamic Bibliography Unit
Cambridge University Library
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