- Email: [email protected]
Egyptian university libraries
ht. Lib. Rev. (1970) 2, 175-181
Egyptian University Libraries MOHAMMED
M. AMANt
The first academic library in Egypt was established in Cairo by the Fatimid Caliph al-Aziz (975-996) in 988, in connection with Bait al-‘Ilm (House of Learning), where students were supported from public and private endowments. Later in 1004 the large library collection was transferred from Bait al-‘Ilm to Bait al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) which was founded by Caliph al-Hakim in 1004.1 Al-Azhar was founded as a mosque by the Fatimids in 969 and was turned into a university which became known as al-Jami’ah al-Azhariyyah in 988 to promote the Shi’ite doctrine. From the time of its establishment and until the end of the nineteenth century, education in al-Azhar was purely religious. In 1896 a law was passed introducing modern subjects into the program of education and in 1908 studies were divided into primary, secondary and higher. In 1930, the higher cycle was organized into three separate faculties: theology, Islamic jurisprudence and Arabic language. In 1961, al-Azhar University was reorganized. It is now composed of seven colleges which offer undergraduate, professional and graduate studies from the faculties of: Theology, Medicine,
Islamic Jurisprudence, Business Administration,
Arabic Studies, and Agriculture.
Engineering,
Prior to al-Azhar reorganization and during the last century a number of high schools for the training of government officials and technicians were established. A school of engineering was founded in 1820, a school of medicine and veterinary science in 1927, a school of agriculture in 1929, and a school of law in 1968. These various units of academic education were absorbed by the private university (al-Jami’ah al-Ahliyyah) which came into existence in 1908. In 1928 it became a state university and the name was changed to al-Jami’ah al-Misriyyah t St. John’s 1 S. K. New York: E
University,
Padover Hafner.
(1957).
Jamaica, Muslim
N.Y.,
U.S.A.
libraries
In:
J.
W.
Thompson,
The Medieval
Library.
176
M.
M.
AMAN
(Egyptian University). After some more changes in the name it is currently known as Cairo University (Jami’at al-Qahira). Since the time of its establishment other universities have come into existence bringing the total number of academic institutions to six major universities and 45 colleges and independent institutions. An Egyptian university (Jami’ah) is organized in major faculties or divisions known as kulliyyat. Within the general regulations of the university the faculty formulates its own curriculum and exercises a considerable degree of control over its internal affairs. The number of faculties vary from one university to the other: 12 at Cairo University and five at the newly established Assiut University. The traditional faculties in the old universities such as Cairo, Ain Shams and Alexandria are : Arts (humanities), Science, Law, Medicine, Pharmacology, Political Sciences and Economics. The faculty of arts includes humanities as well as social sciences and other professions such as library science, political science, psychology and archaeological studies. Each of the faculties is organized into departments based on the subject matter. The number of departments vary from one faculty to another. Because of the tremendous scientific and technical developments, applied science and new technological studies were developed in new special institutions known as ma’ahid fanniyyah or sina’zjyah. These institutions are in principle on a university level, and some of them offer graduate work leading to the Master’s and Ph.D. degrees. There are four of these technical institutes: Cairo Polytechnic Institute; Higher Institute of Agriculture at Shebin al-kom; Higher Technical Institute at Hilwan and Mansoura Polytechnic Institute. Their curricula are similar to those in Europe. New faculties of medicine were founded in Mansoura ( 1960), and Tanta (1963) and are attached to the Universities of Cairo and Alexandria, respectively. Academic organization of Egyptian colleges and universities has its impact on the kinds of libraries that serve the academic community. There are two distinct types of libraries on Egyptian campuses. The comprehensive university libraries comprise both humanities and social sciences and are rich in old and scholarly materials in those areas. On the other hand one finds the more specialized technical and science libraries with relatively new collections and emphasis on foreign publications. In both types of libraries the number of volumes seems unsatisfactory for the increasing demands from faculty and students. The number of students in Egyptian universities and colleges is almost doubling every
EGYPTIAN
UNIVERSITY
177
LIBRARIES
year while the number of volumes added to academic libraries does not indicate any considerable increase over the years. The last available reports indicate that the richest collections, bibliographically speaking, are those of the university libraries of al-Azhar (80,000 volumes, including 20,000 manuscripts), Alexandria University Library (122,225 volumes and over l,OOO,OOOvolumes in its eight faculty and section libraries), and Cairo University Library (215,000 volumes). The word richest is used in comparison to other university and college libraries in the U.A.R. But taken separately, from a librarian’s point of view, these libraries prove to be inadequate for the number of students they serve. Cairo University’s 57,440 students are served by a library collection of 215,000 volumes. In comparison, the University of Illinois has 49,943 students and a collection of more than 3,888,OOO volumes. The university of Alexandria has a total of 37,705 students more than the enrolment of Columbia University and Yale combined, but has a much smaller collection than Yale alone (4,831,738 volumes).1 Other Egyptian universities are faced with the same problems of increasing number of students and decreasing number of volumes in their libraries: Ain Shams University has about 80,000 volumes to serve more than 34,806 students, the University of Assuit has 7345 students and no available book statistics; and al-Azhar has 10,160 students who are served by a collection of slightly more than 80,000 volumes and 20,000 manuscripts. With the new scientific and industrial developments in Egypt, academic libraries have been found falling behind in building extensive collections that meet the needs of the increased number of courses and research projects that are being funded generously by the government. These research activities within the Egyptian universities have been increasing in number and consequently the financing of them has also been increasing from 50,000 prior to 1952 to about l,OOO,OOOEgyptian pounds in 1961-62. This increase in research budgets, however, did not reflect on library budgets and collections which still lack the linguistic and subject diversity that are characteristic of present-day scientific literature. As far as staff and management is concerned Egyptian universities and their libraries are a typical example of state owned and supported institutions. Recruiting, promoting, hiring and firing are influenced by factors outside the university legislative power. Salaries and working conditions are determined by non-academic authorities and are in most cases applicable to academicians and administrators. Most of the university libraries are organized in the following 1 The Europa.
figures
listed
here
are
taken
from
World
of Learning
(1969).
19th
ed.
London:
178
M.
M.
AMAN
departments : Acquisitions, Cataloging, Periodicals, Secretariat/ Accounts, Circulation, Stacks and Reference. Each department has a supervisory officer or head, the exception being the Circulation and Reference departments, which in most cases are considered to be under the direct supervision of the chief librarian. College and university library staff may be divided into three categories: professional staff, selected as much as possible, from the graduates of the Department of Archives and Librarianship. They have no faculty rank or status and are part of the administration staff. Virtually no professional has a combined library science degree and subject degree, especially in the fields of science and technology. This situation can only be improved by expanding the program in the Department of Library Science to include graduates from other faculties who would like to study librarianship on the graduate level. The responsibilities of the professional staff include book selection, cataloging and classification and bibliographic tasks. The situation has encouraged the massing of all professional power for book processing and technical operations leaving reference and information service to the clericals or subprofessionals under the supervision of only one professional. Library assistants form the second group of library personnel. They do most of the work in the departmental and faculty libraries from information and reference work to circulation and supervising the collection and staff. A library assistant has a high school diploma (secondary school diploma) and virtually no library training or experience. The third group of the university staff includes the technician, stack personnel, typists, printers, reading room attendants and others on the same level. Their professional or academic qualifications vary from fair knowledge of reading and writing to the possession of pre-high school diploma. The director of the university library is someone with post graduate degree on the master’s or Ph.D. level, not necessarily in library science, but usually with previous library experience. He is responsible to the deputy director of the university and is not free in policy decisions inside the library. The Library Committee consists of full time professors and the top administrators on campus with the director of libraries who serves as the committee’s secretary. The committee gives the director advice on all matters pertaining to the library’s policies and annual budget. The financial regulations of all academic libraries in Egypt indicate that each librarian is personally responsible for the books under his
EGYPTIAN
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARIES
179
supervision. This regulation is meant literally although the allowable margin of loss is very small and losses have to be paid by the librarian himself. Such personalized responsibility discourages both booklending and the open access practice. It is not surprising, therefore, to see how limited browsing and open access are in Egyptian college libraries. Even in reference rooms there are few books available on open shelves and these in most cases are the less used reference books or information sources. This practice of closed access does not by any means reflect the attitude of the library profession as a whole in the U.A.R. where one finds public libraries and school libraries with complete open access that encourages the public and students to browse among the shelves. Hence the increased demand on public and special libraries and the near abandonment of college and university libraries. Egyptian university libraries have also been criticized for the limited number of hours they remain open. While public and special libraries keep their doors open until 9 and 10 p.m. college libraries close their doors after 7 p.m. In spite of the large number of academic institutions in the U.A.R., the lack of seprate and efficient library buildings is dominant. Even the newly established faculty libraries at the University of Ain Shams and Alexandria are not designed according to the new concepts of modern library planning in advanced societies. Reading rooms are intended mainly for the undergraduates with no available facilities for graduate students, individual studies, or for faculty. In all the new and old library buildings the only media that college libraries are able to accommodate are books and periodicals, with no physical or otherwise provisions for audio or visual materials as they are commonly known to Western universities. The word resources is used in library science terminology to refer to the different media that a library should obtain and make available to its patrons. Any scholar or educator who is aware of the tremendous growth of human knowledge and the increased number of printed and non-printed material available from publishers can not visualize a library that can cope with all this flood of literature. Even the richest of our libraries can not afford to have all the scholarly material that is published in all fields of knowledge. This situation has contributed to the increasing number of co-operative agreements among university libraries in developing countries. Unfortunately, college libraries in the U.A.R. have no plans for co-operative acquisitions of library materials or for sharing of the resources they already have. There are no available formal or informal agreements on the distribution of subject specialties among university libraries. Therefore every college library is duplicating
180
M. M. AMAN
the same collection that other colleges have. The situation is somewhat aggravated by the fact that Egyptian universities suffer from the lack of sufficient hard currency necessary to purchase foreign scholarly publications. Lack of co-operation among Egyptian university libraries can also be noticed in the absence of union catalogs for the holdings of the scattered libraries on campuses or for college libraries in a given city or for the nation at large. This absence of union catalogs is due not only to administrative policies but also to the lack of uniformity in descriptive or subject cataloging on the one hand and classification on the other. Such lack of standard rules especially for classification is so widespread that almost every library has even a different version of the Dewey Decimal Classification which is the most well-known classification scheme in the U.A.R. Other variant classification schemes include the Arabic-Muslim classification of knowledge which is adopted by alAzhar University Library. Cairo University Library uses the accession numbers for arranging books on the shelves and no attempt is being made to classify the library’s collection. Inter-library loan among college and university libraries in the U.A.R. is handicapped by lack of co-operative programs and legislation on standardization. It is rare to see books leaving one college campus for another on inter-library loan basis. Students have to travel from one library to the other in order to read certain books or to find the necessary information which their library cannot provide. It is imperative in a short study like this to provide not only factual information and criticism of current practices of Egyptian librarianship, but also some recommendations that might be considered for providing better library service for students and faculty on Egyptian campuses. Egyptian university libraries must meet predetermined qualitative and quantitative standards of service which can be established by professional or academic organizations in the country. The number of volumes in these libraries should provide the kind of service that college students and faculty need. The service in these libraries should be changed drastically so that optimum dissemination of information can be guaranteed. Co-operative acquisition, centralized processing, sharing of library resources and inter-library loan are a few of the many steps which Egyptian university librarians should take in order to provide better library service. As far as foreign scholarly publications are concerned, university and research centers should agree to co-operative acquisition plans to guarantee that every foreign book of academic interest will be found in at least one of the Egyptian university or special libraries and
EGYPTIAN
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARIES
181
be available to others through inter-library loan. Such co-operation can also be effectively implemented if college and university libraries resort to more advanced techniques for transmitting reference questions, and even documents from scholarly journals and books via telephones, teletypes and telefacsimile, to mention few. Centralized acquisition and processing in main libraries can contribute to uniformity and conformity in storage and retrieval of information from the different libraries in the system. To say the least about time and money being saved from such centralized operations. This centralization can only be implemented if standard codes of subject arrangement and unified rules of bibliographic description are adopted by Egyptian University libraries. Rules for descriptive cataloging are available in Arabic language as a result of the efforts of Sheniti and Mahdi.1 Recently a new code for Arabic subject cataloging was developed by the present writer and it is hoped that such a code will enable Arab librarians to standardize their subject cataloging and to adopt a unified Arabic list of subject headings.2 1 Mahmud Sheniti and Mohammed el-Mahdi. Hanafi. (1962) Qawa’id al-fahrasa al-was Jiyyah. Cairo: Egyptian Library Association. s Mohammed M. Aman. (1968) Analysis of terminology, form and structure of subject headings in Arabic literature andformulation of rulesfor Arabic subject headings. Ph. D. dissertation. University of Pittsburgh.
Egyptian University Libraries MOHAMMED
M. AMANt
The first academic library in Egypt was established in Cairo by the Fatimid Caliph al-Aziz (975-996) in 988, in connection with Bait al-‘Ilm (House of Learning), where students were supported from public and private endowments. Later in 1004 the large library collection was transferred from Bait al-‘Ilm to Bait al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) which was founded by Caliph al-Hakim in 1004.1 Al-Azhar was founded as a mosque by the Fatimids in 969 and was turned into a university which became known as al-Jami’ah al-Azhariyyah in 988 to promote the Shi’ite doctrine. From the time of its establishment and until the end of the nineteenth century, education in al-Azhar was purely religious. In 1896 a law was passed introducing modern subjects into the program of education and in 1908 studies were divided into primary, secondary and higher. In 1930, the higher cycle was organized into three separate faculties: theology, Islamic jurisprudence and Arabic language. In 1961, al-Azhar University was reorganized. It is now composed of seven colleges which offer undergraduate, professional and graduate studies from the faculties of: Theology, Medicine,
Islamic Jurisprudence, Business Administration,
Arabic Studies, and Agriculture.
Engineering,
Prior to al-Azhar reorganization and during the last century a number of high schools for the training of government officials and technicians were established. A school of engineering was founded in 1820, a school of medicine and veterinary science in 1927, a school of agriculture in 1929, and a school of law in 1968. These various units of academic education were absorbed by the private university (al-Jami’ah al-Ahliyyah) which came into existence in 1908. In 1928 it became a state university and the name was changed to al-Jami’ah al-Misriyyah t St. John’s 1 S. K. New York: E
University,
Padover Hafner.
(1957).
Jamaica, Muslim
N.Y.,
U.S.A.
libraries
In:
J.
W.
Thompson,
The Medieval
Library.
176
M.
M.
AMAN
(Egyptian University). After some more changes in the name it is currently known as Cairo University (Jami’at al-Qahira). Since the time of its establishment other universities have come into existence bringing the total number of academic institutions to six major universities and 45 colleges and independent institutions. An Egyptian university (Jami’ah) is organized in major faculties or divisions known as kulliyyat. Within the general regulations of the university the faculty formulates its own curriculum and exercises a considerable degree of control over its internal affairs. The number of faculties vary from one university to the other: 12 at Cairo University and five at the newly established Assiut University. The traditional faculties in the old universities such as Cairo, Ain Shams and Alexandria are : Arts (humanities), Science, Law, Medicine, Pharmacology, Political Sciences and Economics. The faculty of arts includes humanities as well as social sciences and other professions such as library science, political science, psychology and archaeological studies. Each of the faculties is organized into departments based on the subject matter. The number of departments vary from one faculty to another. Because of the tremendous scientific and technical developments, applied science and new technological studies were developed in new special institutions known as ma’ahid fanniyyah or sina’zjyah. These institutions are in principle on a university level, and some of them offer graduate work leading to the Master’s and Ph.D. degrees. There are four of these technical institutes: Cairo Polytechnic Institute; Higher Institute of Agriculture at Shebin al-kom; Higher Technical Institute at Hilwan and Mansoura Polytechnic Institute. Their curricula are similar to those in Europe. New faculties of medicine were founded in Mansoura ( 1960), and Tanta (1963) and are attached to the Universities of Cairo and Alexandria, respectively. Academic organization of Egyptian colleges and universities has its impact on the kinds of libraries that serve the academic community. There are two distinct types of libraries on Egyptian campuses. The comprehensive university libraries comprise both humanities and social sciences and are rich in old and scholarly materials in those areas. On the other hand one finds the more specialized technical and science libraries with relatively new collections and emphasis on foreign publications. In both types of libraries the number of volumes seems unsatisfactory for the increasing demands from faculty and students. The number of students in Egyptian universities and colleges is almost doubling every
EGYPTIAN
UNIVERSITY
177
LIBRARIES
year while the number of volumes added to academic libraries does not indicate any considerable increase over the years. The last available reports indicate that the richest collections, bibliographically speaking, are those of the university libraries of al-Azhar (80,000 volumes, including 20,000 manuscripts), Alexandria University Library (122,225 volumes and over l,OOO,OOOvolumes in its eight faculty and section libraries), and Cairo University Library (215,000 volumes). The word richest is used in comparison to other university and college libraries in the U.A.R. But taken separately, from a librarian’s point of view, these libraries prove to be inadequate for the number of students they serve. Cairo University’s 57,440 students are served by a library collection of 215,000 volumes. In comparison, the University of Illinois has 49,943 students and a collection of more than 3,888,OOO volumes. The university of Alexandria has a total of 37,705 students more than the enrolment of Columbia University and Yale combined, but has a much smaller collection than Yale alone (4,831,738 volumes).1 Other Egyptian universities are faced with the same problems of increasing number of students and decreasing number of volumes in their libraries: Ain Shams University has about 80,000 volumes to serve more than 34,806 students, the University of Assuit has 7345 students and no available book statistics; and al-Azhar has 10,160 students who are served by a collection of slightly more than 80,000 volumes and 20,000 manuscripts. With the new scientific and industrial developments in Egypt, academic libraries have been found falling behind in building extensive collections that meet the needs of the increased number of courses and research projects that are being funded generously by the government. These research activities within the Egyptian universities have been increasing in number and consequently the financing of them has also been increasing from 50,000 prior to 1952 to about l,OOO,OOOEgyptian pounds in 1961-62. This increase in research budgets, however, did not reflect on library budgets and collections which still lack the linguistic and subject diversity that are characteristic of present-day scientific literature. As far as staff and management is concerned Egyptian universities and their libraries are a typical example of state owned and supported institutions. Recruiting, promoting, hiring and firing are influenced by factors outside the university legislative power. Salaries and working conditions are determined by non-academic authorities and are in most cases applicable to academicians and administrators. Most of the university libraries are organized in the following 1 The Europa.
figures
listed
here
are
taken
from
World
of Learning
(1969).
19th
ed.
London:
178
M.
M.
AMAN
departments : Acquisitions, Cataloging, Periodicals, Secretariat/ Accounts, Circulation, Stacks and Reference. Each department has a supervisory officer or head, the exception being the Circulation and Reference departments, which in most cases are considered to be under the direct supervision of the chief librarian. College and university library staff may be divided into three categories: professional staff, selected as much as possible, from the graduates of the Department of Archives and Librarianship. They have no faculty rank or status and are part of the administration staff. Virtually no professional has a combined library science degree and subject degree, especially in the fields of science and technology. This situation can only be improved by expanding the program in the Department of Library Science to include graduates from other faculties who would like to study librarianship on the graduate level. The responsibilities of the professional staff include book selection, cataloging and classification and bibliographic tasks. The situation has encouraged the massing of all professional power for book processing and technical operations leaving reference and information service to the clericals or subprofessionals under the supervision of only one professional. Library assistants form the second group of library personnel. They do most of the work in the departmental and faculty libraries from information and reference work to circulation and supervising the collection and staff. A library assistant has a high school diploma (secondary school diploma) and virtually no library training or experience. The third group of the university staff includes the technician, stack personnel, typists, printers, reading room attendants and others on the same level. Their professional or academic qualifications vary from fair knowledge of reading and writing to the possession of pre-high school diploma. The director of the university library is someone with post graduate degree on the master’s or Ph.D. level, not necessarily in library science, but usually with previous library experience. He is responsible to the deputy director of the university and is not free in policy decisions inside the library. The Library Committee consists of full time professors and the top administrators on campus with the director of libraries who serves as the committee’s secretary. The committee gives the director advice on all matters pertaining to the library’s policies and annual budget. The financial regulations of all academic libraries in Egypt indicate that each librarian is personally responsible for the books under his
EGYPTIAN
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARIES
179
supervision. This regulation is meant literally although the allowable margin of loss is very small and losses have to be paid by the librarian himself. Such personalized responsibility discourages both booklending and the open access practice. It is not surprising, therefore, to see how limited browsing and open access are in Egyptian college libraries. Even in reference rooms there are few books available on open shelves and these in most cases are the less used reference books or information sources. This practice of closed access does not by any means reflect the attitude of the library profession as a whole in the U.A.R. where one finds public libraries and school libraries with complete open access that encourages the public and students to browse among the shelves. Hence the increased demand on public and special libraries and the near abandonment of college and university libraries. Egyptian university libraries have also been criticized for the limited number of hours they remain open. While public and special libraries keep their doors open until 9 and 10 p.m. college libraries close their doors after 7 p.m. In spite of the large number of academic institutions in the U.A.R., the lack of seprate and efficient library buildings is dominant. Even the newly established faculty libraries at the University of Ain Shams and Alexandria are not designed according to the new concepts of modern library planning in advanced societies. Reading rooms are intended mainly for the undergraduates with no available facilities for graduate students, individual studies, or for faculty. In all the new and old library buildings the only media that college libraries are able to accommodate are books and periodicals, with no physical or otherwise provisions for audio or visual materials as they are commonly known to Western universities. The word resources is used in library science terminology to refer to the different media that a library should obtain and make available to its patrons. Any scholar or educator who is aware of the tremendous growth of human knowledge and the increased number of printed and non-printed material available from publishers can not visualize a library that can cope with all this flood of literature. Even the richest of our libraries can not afford to have all the scholarly material that is published in all fields of knowledge. This situation has contributed to the increasing number of co-operative agreements among university libraries in developing countries. Unfortunately, college libraries in the U.A.R. have no plans for co-operative acquisitions of library materials or for sharing of the resources they already have. There are no available formal or informal agreements on the distribution of subject specialties among university libraries. Therefore every college library is duplicating
180
M. M. AMAN
the same collection that other colleges have. The situation is somewhat aggravated by the fact that Egyptian universities suffer from the lack of sufficient hard currency necessary to purchase foreign scholarly publications. Lack of co-operation among Egyptian university libraries can also be noticed in the absence of union catalogs for the holdings of the scattered libraries on campuses or for college libraries in a given city or for the nation at large. This absence of union catalogs is due not only to administrative policies but also to the lack of uniformity in descriptive or subject cataloging on the one hand and classification on the other. Such lack of standard rules especially for classification is so widespread that almost every library has even a different version of the Dewey Decimal Classification which is the most well-known classification scheme in the U.A.R. Other variant classification schemes include the Arabic-Muslim classification of knowledge which is adopted by alAzhar University Library. Cairo University Library uses the accession numbers for arranging books on the shelves and no attempt is being made to classify the library’s collection. Inter-library loan among college and university libraries in the U.A.R. is handicapped by lack of co-operative programs and legislation on standardization. It is rare to see books leaving one college campus for another on inter-library loan basis. Students have to travel from one library to the other in order to read certain books or to find the necessary information which their library cannot provide. It is imperative in a short study like this to provide not only factual information and criticism of current practices of Egyptian librarianship, but also some recommendations that might be considered for providing better library service for students and faculty on Egyptian campuses. Egyptian university libraries must meet predetermined qualitative and quantitative standards of service which can be established by professional or academic organizations in the country. The number of volumes in these libraries should provide the kind of service that college students and faculty need. The service in these libraries should be changed drastically so that optimum dissemination of information can be guaranteed. Co-operative acquisition, centralized processing, sharing of library resources and inter-library loan are a few of the many steps which Egyptian university librarians should take in order to provide better library service. As far as foreign scholarly publications are concerned, university and research centers should agree to co-operative acquisition plans to guarantee that every foreign book of academic interest will be found in at least one of the Egyptian university or special libraries and
EGYPTIAN
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARIES
181
be available to others through inter-library loan. Such co-operation can also be effectively implemented if college and university libraries resort to more advanced techniques for transmitting reference questions, and even documents from scholarly journals and books via telephones, teletypes and telefacsimile, to mention few. Centralized acquisition and processing in main libraries can contribute to uniformity and conformity in storage and retrieval of information from the different libraries in the system. To say the least about time and money being saved from such centralized operations. This centralization can only be implemented if standard codes of subject arrangement and unified rules of bibliographic description are adopted by Egyptian University libraries. Rules for descriptive cataloging are available in Arabic language as a result of the efforts of Sheniti and Mahdi.1 Recently a new code for Arabic subject cataloging was developed by the present writer and it is hoped that such a code will enable Arab librarians to standardize their subject cataloging and to adopt a unified Arabic list of subject headings.2 1 Mahmud Sheniti and Mohammed el-Mahdi. Hanafi. (1962) Qawa’id al-fahrasa al-was Jiyyah. Cairo: Egyptian Library Association. s Mohammed M. Aman. (1968) Analysis of terminology, form and structure of subject headings in Arabic literature andformulation of rulesfor Arabic subject headings. Ph. D. dissertation. University of Pittsburgh.