Melcom International, the European Association of Middle East Libraries, is an academic professional organisation, devoted to promoting co-operation among individuals and institutions in Europe, in particular, and all over the world in general; concerned with all aspects of Middle East librarianship, book collecting, the book trade and publishing.
It pursues its aims without any discrimination on the grounds of race, religion, sex, nationality or political philosophy.
Turkey and the Arab Spring: Implications for Turkish Foreign Policy from a Transatlantic Perspective
Source: Istituto Affari Internazionali
From the Foreword:
The Arab Spring reveals a number of contradictions, constraints as well as opportunities for Turkish foreign policy, all of which are of key relevance both to Turkey and to its transatlantic partners.
In the short-term, the Arab Spring has revealed a number of inconsistencies in and weaknesses of Turkish foreign policy, particularly when mapped against the stances of the European Union (EU) and the United States. These weaknesses and inconsistencies may be viewed as by- products of a more proactive Turkish role in its southern neighborhood. Over the last decade, Turkish foreign policy has become more open to engagement with its neighbors, more eager to resolve regional problems and less secularized in nature. Improved relations with Syria, Iraq, and Iran (as well as Russia, Armenia, and Greece) are evidence of this. But this does not mean that Turkish foreign policy has been purely idealistic and norm driven. The Arab Spring has revealed the inherent tension between the normative and realpolitik dimensions of Turkish foreign policy.
Arab Reform Bulletin published since 2003 by Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has recently changed its name to Sada.
On Nov. 1, 2011 UNESCO launched Global Open Access Portal (GOAP)Posting from the blog of Manuscripts Division of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.
"Cataloging is now available online for most of the nearly 10,000 Islamic manuscripts in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. These extraordinary holdings of Islamic manuscripts constitute the premier collection of Islamic manuscripts in the Western Hemisphere and among the finest in the world. About two-thirds of these were the gift of Robert Garrett, Class of 1897. The online records have been created as part of the Islamic Manuscripts Cataloging and Digitization Project, to improve access to these rich collections and share them worldwide through digital technology. Generous support from the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project has funded this ongoing effort. Researchers can now locate manuscripts by searching the Library’s online catalog. The Library has digitized 200 manuscripts in the Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts.Over the past two years, the Princeton University Library has created online bibliographic records covering its collections of Arabic manuscripts in the Garrett and New Series. These had previously been only described in three printed catalogs: Descriptive Catalog of the Garrett Collection of Arabic Manuscripts in the Princeton University Library (P. K. Hitti, N. A. Faris, and B. ‘Abd al-Malik), Catalogue of Arabic Manuscripts (Yahuda Section) in the Garrett Collection (R. Mach), and Handlist of Arabic Manuscripts (New Series) in the Princeton University Library (R. Mach and E. Ormsby). Over two-thirds of the Library’s some 10,000 volumes of Islamic manuscripts are described in these catalogs. The catalogs were converted to XML format, and the resulting files were then edited for accuracy and consistency—they now have authorized names, properly romanized titles, and appropriate subject headings. The files were then imported into the Library’s online catalog. Still underway is an effort to link records that describe multi-text volumes.
The Third Series, comprising over 750 volumes in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, and Jawi, has been completely cataloged, and a finding aid has been created for the William McElwee Miller Collection of Bābī Writings and Other Iranian Texts, 1846–1923, comprised of 47 volumes of writings of the Bāb, Subḥ-i Azal, and Bahá’u’lláh, and their respective followers. The collection also includes Sufi texts and an anti-Islamic polemic writings. The Miller collection has been digitized, largely from microfilm, and is being made available online by the Library as a service to scholarship. File sizes are large (30–590 MB) and may take some time to download.
For more information about the cataloging, contact Denise L. Soufi, Islamic Manuscripts Cataloger, at delsoufi@princeton.edu; for information about the overall project, contact Don C. Skemer, Curator of Manuscripts, at dcskemer@princeton.edu."
A new digital initiative offers online visitors a view of Islamic Art collections at museums from around the world. Over 40 museums in 18 countries are included in Explore Collections of Islamic Art, a resource recently launched by Museum With No Frontiers (MWNF).
Items on view range from paintings and documents to work in metal, ivory, clay and more, dating from the Umayyad dynasty to the late Ottoman period. High resolution photographs allow visitors to see the pieces in detail. The descriptions accompanying many of the collections appear in English and other languages, including Arabic, French, German and Italian.
MWNF plans to expand this resource by adding additional art collections, with objects from museums in Sharjah, Athens and Vienna slated to appear on the site soon.
Photograph: Batha Palace Museum. Image courtesy of the Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.
Contributed by ArchNet Librarian
The Washington Review of Turkish & Eurasian Affairs is an online journal for scholarly discussion of political, social, and economic issues affecting Turkish and Eurasian societies. The journal presents a forum on a broad range of topics and facilitates building, sharing, exchange and dissemination of ideas aimed at both professional and general audiences.
"The University of Michigan Library’s “Collaboration in Cataloging: Islamic Manuscripts at Michigan” project staff are pleased to announce that our collaborative project to fully catalogue our Islamic Manuscripts Collection has been officially extended through December 2012. This extension will allow us to complete the time-consuming physical examination of those manuscripts that have thus far only been examined in the digital environment by the project cataloguer, Evyn Kropf, and by our generous colleagues around the world.
To date, this extensive digital examination - combined with physical examination efforts on the part of the project cataloguer and her cataloguing assistants, has resulted in 810 of the roughly 880 previously uncatalogued manuscripts being fully or near fully catalogued with detailed, data-rich records in our online library catalogue. 136 of these are in fact manuscripts for which digitization is not possible at this time.
The extension will also allow us to continue receiving and archiving your contributions to enhance the cataloguing as you interact with the manuscripts and their descriptions via the project website ( http://www.lib.umich.edu/islamic ).
We greatly appreciate your support for the project thus far, and would be especially grateful for any further contributions you could make to the cataloguing of the remaining manuscripts, including review of existing descriptive data where available.
These manuscripts still to be catalogued are listed on the project site here:
http://www.lib.umich.edu/islamic/archives/category/ notyetcatalogued
Your expertise remains an invaluable complement to our local cataloguing efforts. Treasures from the collection are still being unearthed, and we appreciate your continued participation in the cataloguing endeavors.
We look forward to seeing your comments posted to the project site and thank you in advance for your valuable contribution to this project.
As always, please feel free to forward any questions, comments and/or suggestions to project staff at islamic.manuscripts@umich.edu,
Türkiye Ekonomik ve Kültürel Dayanışma Vakfı (TEK-DAV)’nın bir yayın organıdır.
Türkiye Ekonomik ve Kültürel Dayanışma Vakfı adına sahibi Prof.Dr. Hikmet AKGÜL (Ankara)
It is a publication of Turkey Economical and Culturel Solidarity (TEK-DAV) Foundation.
The owner is Prof.Dr.Hikmet Akgul on behalf of Turkey Economical and Culturel Solidarity (Ankara)
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