Many Middle Eastern nations are making significant investments in higher education systems, and some have built libraries on par with the best in the world. But most colleges and universities in the region are only at the early stages of building electronic collections, and a few still rely on the card catalogues of earlier times.
Nikolas Coffrin, a senior sales coordinator in the AAAS Office of Publishing and Member Services, was in the Middle East for a month this spring, co-hosting a workshop, visiting libraries, and talking with librarians. In their meetings -- and in many casual conversations over coffee or tea -- he found them eager to engage with AAAS and Science and to build expertise that will aid their libraries and their nations' economies.
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The workshop emerged from discussions last year between Tom Ryan, director of site license sales for Science, and Mohamed Ghali Rashid, a librarian at Arabian Gulf University, during a meeting of the Special Libraries Association-Arabian Gulf Chapter (SLA-AGC).
Convening from 31 March to 2 April, "Electronic Collection Development for Health & Medicine E-Libraries" brought 30 librarians from the region's universities and medical research centers to Manama, Bahrain, for lectures, hands-on training, and networking. It was co-sponsored by SLA-AGC/Mondesic TechKnowledge, a publishing agent based in Dubai, and AAAS/Science. The workshop was followed by the 2007 SLA-AGC annual meeting, where Coffrin made informal presentations to many of the 200 librarians who attended.
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