Library and Information Science in the Middle East and North Africa

Amanda B. Click, Sumayya Ahmed, Jacob Hill, John D. Martin III, Amanda B. Click, Sumayya Ahmed, Jacob Hill, John D. Martin III

• Publisher: De Gruyter Saur
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9783110396416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Biblioteconomía y ciencia de la información

This volume offers up-to-date insights into the state of library and information science (LIS) in the Middle East and North Africa. Covered topics include information literacy, intellectual property, LIS education and research, publishing and more. This timely contribution thus presents vital areas of research on a region that receives relatively little coverage and is currently experiencing rapid and significant changes.

Christof Galli

1Arab Book Publishing

Introduction

In a 1975 article in MELA Notes, David Partington, then Middle East librarian at Harvard College, attempted to estimate the number of publications produced in the Middle East (all the Arabic-speaking countries and Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan). In one of his tabulations (Partington, 1975, p. 17) he estimated that an average of “about 30 percent of total Middle Eastern production is in subjects outside of a liberal collecting policy. By liberal collecting policy I mean most of the books in literature, linguistics, humanities, and the social science works applicable to the native countries” (Partington, 1975, p. 15). He “regard[s as] ‘non-collectable’ subjects: generalities, trade, transport, mathematics, natural sciences, medical sciences, industries, agriculture, domestic science, commercial techniques, games & sports” (p. 15).

Today, very few collection policies for academic libraries, especially not at a tier – one research institution like Harvard, would systematically exclude materials in these fields from their Middle East collections. Whereas area studies, during the first two thirds of the twentieth century, became a way to support the “universalization of the social sciences” by providing “concrete data to bear on generalization and theory” (Mitchell, 2004, p. 85), paradigmatic shifts which occurred under the influence of poststructuralist and postcolonial theoretical developments have increasingly eroded these disciplinary strictures and limitations. The goal is a reconfigured and “re-envisaged, cosmopolitan area studies that seeks to provincialize universal western knowledge claims to become more inclusive of, as well as relevant to, the concerns of people in the majority world” (Hörschelmann & Stenning, 2008, p. 355). This approach has triggered increased demand for the acquisition of a broader thematic palette of published materials from the Global South, and consequently, the Arab Middle East, in order to document and make accessible the cultural and scientific output of this region. The scope of this endeavor clearly goes beyond the above-mentioned “liberal collecting policy” of 40 years ago to include publications covering the whole gamut of life experience reflected in the published output. Hazen (2009) writes of today’s scholarship:

[c]ross-disciplinary inquiry, participatory learning, an obsession with primary resources and original documentation in all formats, and hybrid methodologies are increasingly the norm…. Newly minted centers, institutes, programs, and initiatives today provide homes for interdisciplinary scholarship, even as traditional departments remain strong (pp. 5–6).

Amid these trends, which apply closely to the field of Middle Eastern studies, librarians will have to find ways, financial restrictions notwithstanding, to acquire materials to build research-level collections of materials from markets such as the Arabic publishing arena, which ranges from the Arabian Peninsula to the western reaches of North Africa. To live up to the challenge of efficiently capturing the materials to ‘feed’ the emerging methodological trends in scholarship and teaching, we have to understand the workings of the regional book publishing and distribution sector.

Previous studies have examined Arab publishing from the perspective of libraries with the intent to determine at which level relevant materials of the available output from the region was to be acquired. Hopwood (1972) and Partington (1975) both found that production of “collectable” materials was increasing and that budgets should be increased to acquire more comprehensively from all countries in the Middle East. Hirsch (2007) notes the emergence of varying levels of need for core collections which address immediate curricular and instructional requirements on the one hand and for research collections which are geared towards long-term, primary-source-oriented faculty- and graduate-level research on the other hand.

Reflecting sustained scholarly and policy interest in the Middle East both pre- and post-September 11, 2001, Arabic book holdings in U.S. libraries have doubled between 1992 and 2007 (see Table 1.1). Even so, in 2007, the number of books from Arab countries was about half of those from regions with comparable populations (200–600 million): about one eighth from Western Europe (even excluding those from the United Kingdom); 40% of Eastern Europe; and about half of Latin America. Arabic books slightly exceeded those from Southeast Asia and their number was about twice as high as the one for books from Sub-Saharan Africa (Kurzman, 2014).

Tab. 1.1: Number of records for books in Middle Eastern languages from OCLC/WorldCat, 1992–2007 (Kurzman, 2015).

This chapter proposes to provide a snapshot of book publishing in the Arab world at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, which for the purpose of this study includes Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Yemen. The goal of this chapter is to provide academic librarians with an understanding of the industry, its challenges and emerging trends. The chapter begins with descriptions of the number and types of books published, and then describes the particular challenges in the areas of distribution, pricing, censorship and copyright that negatively affect book publishing. It ends with a brief description of nascent Arabic e-publishing initiatives.

The Arabic language, one the United Nations six official languages (United Nations, 2015), constitutes a powerful unifying force which has produced a measure of cultural cohesion in an otherwise geographically and politically fractured region. In fact, in the region’s sociopolitical quest to define and build national and state identities, Arabic has formed an important “cornerstone” (Suleiman, 2006, p. 125) and has been championed as a “bond of identity, over religion” by sociopolitical movements and activists (p. 126). With its over 300 million speakers,1the Arabic speaking demographic seems to harbor formidable potential for both producing and consuming cultural output in considerable quantities. Increasingly, users of online social media services in the Arab region, such as Twitter and Facebook, use Arabic as their language of choice. The number of tweets in Arabic and originating in the Arab world increased from 62.1% in 2012 to 75% in 2014 in the Arab region, and postings on Facebook and the use its Arabic interface is on the rise (Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government [MBRSG] 2012, 2014a). Arabic, then, continues to function as a major world language, and the Arab book markets with their base in more than 300 million speakers has enormous potential for both print and digital publications.

Reading

Awareness of socio-economic and educational indicators and behaviors help in determining the parameters of the market which librarians have to probe in order to cover the areas and subjects in which relevant societal discourses take place, thereby allowing for successful documentation of cultural and scientific output of Arab societies. Furthermore, reader behavior and attitudes are of interest to publishers and help them shape their programming and marketing strategies. Two such indicators are literacy, and, closely related, reading behavior. Low literacy rates have been a scourge in the region for many years and progress in remediating the situation has been difficult. At the beginning of the 21st century, there were “over 70 million illiterates out of a population of 280 million” in the Arab region, and this is the situation even after a concerted effort which reduced illiteracy from 48.7% in 1990 to 38.5% in 2000 (UNESCO-Beirut, 2003, p. 12). For 2015, UNESCO projects a 79.2% combined male/female literacy rate for the Arab States, leaving an illiterate adult population (15 years+) of 47.6 million, 66.8% of which are female (UNESCO, 2013, pp. 27–28).

The reading habits of literate populations have only been studied scantily (see Table 1.2). The unprovable claim (Caldwell, 2012) that Arabs read “6 minutes a year,” spread by, among others, the Arab Thought Foundation (Arab Thought Foundation, 2011, p. 500) is hardly a ‘real’ measure for the reading habits of a 300-million-people public. A recent survey by the NextPage Foundation presents a more detailed and richer (but not an entirely reliable or clear) picture of the reading public in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Morocco (NextPage, 2007a) and Algeria, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria (NextPage, 2007b). Both surveys focus on literate adults aged 15–65 in a variety of socio-economic groups. The survey has found that, with the exception of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, a larger share than expected of literate people do not read (Harabi, 2007, p. 14). In addition, any readers read for only an hour a day or less, reading is limited to school without aiming to turn pupils into life-long readers, and once they complete school, adults stop reading at age 19 or earlier and often do not read significantly again (Harabi, 2007, p. 14).

The findings indicate that solid portions of surveyed readers read books, albeit to a lesser degree than newspapers and magazines which serve as source for information on current events, politics, and news (NextPage, 2007a, 2007b). The preferred reading language is Arabic for books and serials. Saudi and Egyptian readers indicated that they equally liked Arabic for reading books and reading online; Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian readers indicated their preference for French when reading online whereas Lebanese readers preferred English for online reading. English is the second most read language in Syria, Jordan and Palestine, an activity mostly undertaken with the goal of improving language competency. Readers in Lebanon, Tunisia, and Morocco indicated a higher incidence of reading French books than other countries. The majority of book-readers are interested in (Islamic) devotional literature (Qur’an, tafsir, sirah, etc.), but also in literature. Responses indicate that a majority of readers who bought books during the 12 months preceding the survey did not purchase translated titles. Surprisingly, a relatively small portion of surveyed readers attend book fairs. One cannot help but note the rather narrow spectrum of reading preferences mentioned by survey participants. One commentator of the survey attributes this paucity of topics to a poor variety in the supply of titles from other Arab countries caused by lack of trade in publishing rights between Arab publishers, high tariffs, and distribution problems (Habeeb n.d.). A second commentator notes the same narrow range of interests and similarly attributes it, on the one hand, to insufficient variety in the supply and marketing strategies of Arab publishers, but also, on the other hand, to lack in broad-based literacy (Wile n.d., p. 16).

Tab. 1.2: Reading habits of Arab publics (NextPage, 2007a, 2007b).

Challenges to Statistical Assessments of Arabic Book Publishing

There are currently no unified reporting mechanisms which would allow the systematic tracking of the production of books, and Arab publishing as a wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About IFLA
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, and Appendices
• Introduction
• 1 Arab Book Publishing
• 2 For a Morocco that Reads: The Crisis of Reading and Recent Initiatives to Revive Libraries and Reading in Morocco
• 3 A Bird’s Eye View of Two Open Access Experiences in Algeria: CERIST’s Webreview and Dépôt numérique de l’Université d’Alger I
• 4 Academic Librarianship and Coercion: A Case Study in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
• 5 American-style Academic Libraries in the Gulf Region
• 6 Information Literacy in the Middle East: A Case Study of the American University in Cairo and the American University of Sharjah
• 7 Aligning Library Services to the Emerging Online Capability of Emirati Students
• 8 Correlating Information Centers to Emerging Knowledge-based Economies
• 9 Education for Library and Information Science in the Arab States
• 10 Library and Information Science Research in the Arab World: A Systematic Review 2004–2013
• 11 Addressing Bias in the Cataloging and Classification of Arabic and Islamic Materials: Approaches from Domain Analysis
• 12 Library Collaboration in the Middle East and North Africa
• 13 The State of Manuscript Digitization Projects in Some Egyptian Libraries and Their Challenges
• Contributors
• Index
• Footnotes