News from the Cairo Office
Administrative Change
In January 2006, Michael Albin assumed the position of Acting Field Director of the Cairo, Egypt Office.
In January, Mr. Amr Ibrahim, resigned his post as Computer Management Assistant and emigrated to New York City, U.S.A. In June, Mr. Hisham Makki was promoted into the Computer Management Assistant position recently vacated by Mr. Amr Ibrahim.
Acquisitions Travel
During 2005, Cairo staff have, or will have, attended book fairs in Tunisia, Libya, Oman, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates. The trip Mr. Ismail Soliman made to the Tripoli book fair was especially exciting since it was the first time a Library of Congress staff member has been allowed to travel to Libya in over 25 years. During that trip, Mr. Ismail made contact with a book dealer who will work closely with us to supply books from Libya for the Library of Congress and MECAP participants. Additionally, the field director and Mr. Ismail will travel to Ankara, Turkey to bolster our exchange relations with the Turkish National Library and other research and cultural institutions in Ankara.
Cataloging Update
In January the African Asian Acquisitions and Overseas Operation Division in Washington hosted a conference of automation and senior cataloging staff to train the six overseas offices to use Voyager as a means to catalog material acquired by the offices. Telecommunications have improved dramatically during the past few years making it possible for our six offices to work live on the Library of Congress online catalog seven days a week.
The offices implemented the shift from our IFOS cataloging module to Voyager for non-Arabic material at the same time RLIN moved to RLIN21. This coincided with the Cairo International Book Fair. The timing for these changes was not good, but was completely out of our control and no one could have predicted that the RLIN shift would be as disruptive as it was. A backlog in processing work built up during this transitional period, but by the end of the summer, it was worked off and business went back to normal. With the introduction of Voyager into the Cairo office, we resumed full descriptive cataloging for most of the Arabic works acquired by the office and continued the subject cataloging for works classified in "B" for Islam.
Serials Holding Data
The Cairo office began adding holding data in Voyager for all serials acquired for the Library of Congress Law Library. In September we will begin adding holding data for all serials in Western roman script languages for the general collection as well.
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Comments: Cairo Office cairo@loc.gov
(08/15/2005)