LCCN, May 14, 2013
ISSN 2324-6464
Collecting Library Materials Around the World: Report from Cairo
Melanie Polutta
Based on an interview with William Kopycki, field director, and Ahmed
Moustafa, head of the Serials, Binding and Shipping Unit of the Library of
Congress Cairo Overseas Office
As I mentioned in the previous article
(http://listserv.loc.gov/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1302
<http://listserv.loc.gov/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1302&L=lccn&T=0&P=175>
&L=lccn&T=0&P=175) about the Overseas Offices (
<http://www.loc.gov/acq/ovop/> http://www.loc.gov/acq/ovop/), one of the
primary duties and indeed the reason the offices were first created was to
acquire materials from geographic areas that did not traditionally have a
dependable supply line. The Cairo Office handles materials from countries of
North Africa and the Middle East: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Gaza, Iraq,
Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, West Bank, and
Yemen. That is 21 countries! (Though I confess that the Nairobi Offices
handles even more countries, but we'll get to them later. Today is Cairo.)
As you might guess from that geographic scope, the predominant language of
materials acquired is Arabic, but it is by no means the only one; after all,
the goal of these offices is to obtain the harder-to-get materials, so that
includes languages such as Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, French, English, and
other regional languages and dialects spoken in the countries.
The 35 employees of the Cairo Office (one Turkish Kurd, one American, and 33
Egyptian nationals) do a magnificent job under sometimes trying
circumstances. As described by both William Kopycki and Ahmed Moustafa, the
different acquisitions specialists have to travel regularly, because to do
business in those cultures, only the personal touch will do. We are
fortunate that the employees in Cairo are long-term, established people,
because they have been able to develop the relationships and the reputation
which enables them to do their jobs well. Besides working with some
commercial vendors and bibliographic representatives in these countries,
they frequently - or as frequently as the budget and political climate will
allow - visit the bookstores, publishers' offices, and book fairs where they
may end up with twenty-plus boxes of books that can only be obtained
face-to-face. Or, they may go knocking on the doors of the government and
non-government organizations that do so much important work in North Africa,
but who are not large enough to create their own distribution channels or be
carried by commercial vendors. And despite the vigilance of the acquisitions
staff, they are constantly surprised by the serial that suddenly appears on
their radar, two years into its existence, which they discover by chance.
The specialists carry lists of titles they want along with a list of titles
they already hold. Paper is still the most dependable medium because the
Internet is frequently unreliable or unavailable in some of the locations in
which acquisitions specialists do business.
Political events have an impact on the Cairo Office as well. As you might
guess from the location of the office, the Arab Spring activities that began
in 2010 and continue to the present day were and are of great interest.
First, of course, they were intensely interesting since the 2011 events in
Egypt actually made it difficult-to-impossible for the employees to make
their way to work for several days and Kopycki was evacuated along with
Department of State colleagues for safety. The office itself closed down
for six working days in January of 2011. The office where they are located
is right next door to Tahrir Square, the center of activity, so even after
things had pretty much returned to normal, for a while security concerns
meant that they had to carry all items to ship out to the truck, instead of
the truck coming to them.
But the other reaction was to collect! As soon as they could, the
specialists of the Cairo office made it a top priority to collect as much of
the materials related to political activity as they could. The newly
available ephemera is particularly challenging, since there is no regular
way to get their hands on it; sometimes it is as simple - and as difficult -
as walking the streets and accepting the handouts of the previously silenced
parties that are now making their voices heard. One of the employees made an
extra effort to take pictures of the signs that were springing up, which is
now being made into a special collection of photographs. As the politics of
the region continue to be in upheaval, the Cairo Office staff continue to
rise to the challenge of collecting all they can get their hands on about
the current events that are already, I have no doubt, an object for study by
scholars world wide.
_____
At end of posting:
Disclaimer: This message does not represent official Library of Congress
communications. Links to external Internet sites on Library of Congress Web
pages do not constitute the Library's endorsement of the content of their
Web sites or of their policies or products. Please read our Standard
Disclaimer. (http://www.loc.gov/global/disclaim.html)
LCCN is available in electronic form only and is free of charge. To
subscribe, send a mail message to [email protected] with the text:
subscribe lccn [firstname lastname]. Please be sure that the text is the
body of the message, not the subject line. And if you wish to see previous
postings from this listserv, go to http://sun8.loc.gov/listarch/lccn.html
Melanie Polutta
Library of Congress
LCCN Editor
