2013 Spring Issue - School of Information and Library Science ...

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By Matt Poland
Last May, like a caravan headed east, several SILS graduate students and
faculty members set off for Morocco with all their enthusiasm and expertise
in tow. While their explicit purpose was to hold a workshop on metadata and
knowledge management, their less tangible aim was to expand the dialogue
between information professionals in the West and the Middle East. SILS faculty
was represented by Dr. Javed Mostafa, Dr. Evelyn Daniel, and Dr. Jane Greenberg,
along with MSLS student Billy Cook and Ph.D. students Summaya Ahmed and
Sarah Ramdeen.
Both Ahmed and Ramdeen are fellows of the ELIME-21 program, a joint
venture between SILS and the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East
and Muslim Civilizations. Led by principal investigator Dr. Barbara Moran, Louis
Round Wilson Distinguished Professor at SILS, ELIME-21 stands for “Educating
Librarians in the Middle East: Building Bridges for the 21st Century.” According
to co-principal investigator Mostafa, the program has two overarching
goals. “The first goal of the program is to provide opportunities for graduate
students, particularly for doctoral students, to get training in a Middle Eastern
cultural context. We want them to have a chance to interact and learn in those
countries. The topics of their experiences vary, from the digitization of scholarly
Arabic materials to the organization, collecting, and cataloguing of materials
at institutions across the Middle East.”
“The wider goal of ELIME is to promote and participate in the development
of library and information science programs in the Middle East,” Mostafa con-
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Faculty Research:
tinued. “We are now engaged in a discussion about developing an LIS certificate
program in Morocco, with similar efforts underway in Egypt as well. We received
significant investment from the Institute of Museum and Library Services that
provided us with the impetus to explore these goals fully.”
Intercultural communication through library and information science is the
mission of ELIME, and for the metadata workshop that took these members of
the SILS community to Morocco. “We too often give lip service to cross-cultural
communication, but until you’re involved in it you don’t really realize what
differences there are,” said Daniel, who co-led the workshop with Greenberg.
“The only thing for it is lots of exposure and experience between cultures.”
The workshop took place on the campus of one of ELIME’s primary partners,
Al-Akhawayn University (AUI) in Ifrane, Morocco. Though it may not fit
with many westerners’ idea of Morocco, Ifrane is a European-style alpine town
nestled in the Middle Atlas Mountains about 150 miles southeast of the nation’s
capital, Rabat. “It’s actually a ski resort in the winter,” Cook said. AUI itself is
a small – about 1,800 students – public university that was founded by royal
decree in the 1990s. With its architecture in keeping with the alpine style of
the town, Evelyn Daniel said, “It’s a beautiful campus, and the facilities were
quite comfortable.”
Although coordinating the development of the metadata workshop presented
something of a challenge – while Evelyn Daniel was at SILS, Jane Greenberg
was in the middle of a semester teaching and conducting research in Spain (see