Marta Deyrup
Assistant Professor and Librarian, Seton Hall University, Glen Rock, NJ
Field: Library Science
Host Institution: Centre National de Coordination et de Planification de la Recherche Scientifique et Technique, Morocco
Dates of Grant: February 1 -21, 2003

My fifteen-year-old son and I arrived in Rabat on February 2, 2003 to find instead of the snow and ice of northern New Jersey, spring-like weather and temperatures in the 50s. That week, I began work at the Insitut Marocain de l'information scientifique et technique (IMIST) at its temporary location in the capital. IMIST was created in 2000 and will break ground in July as a full-fledged part of the Moroccan university system.

Although there are 14 universities in Morocco, there is no centralized university library system. Instead, libraries function autonomously, as divisions of individual departments or institutes. There are few electronic resources for researchers, no unified catalog for books or serials, and little exchange of materials among academic institutions. This will all change in the next few years. The Moroccan government has committed itself to expanding and modernizing its university and public library system as part of educational reform in the country.

Mohammed Essadaoui (IMIST's project leader) and I visited the institute's future site in central Rabat. The building plan calls for a modern library that will house an extensive collection of scientific and technical periodicals, study rooms, computing facilities for patrons, archives, and a circulating collection of books organized according to the American Dewey Decimal System.

During my three-week stay in Rabat I conducted a series of lectures and workshops on topics related to American librarianship. Most of the topics were technical in scope, covering such areas as traditional and virtual models of interlibrary loan, integrated library database management systems, electronic reserve systems, the creation of online theses and dissertations, and bibliographic records and metadata standards. But we also looked at library management issues, such as workflow procedures, using surveys and user statistics for decision-making purposes, U.S. copyright law as applied to libraries, and the general trend toward the open access of scholarly communication.

What was particularly valuable for the IMIST team was to gain a basis of comparison between the American university library system and that of the Francophone world with which they are very familiar. IMIST will serve as the hub for the exchange of scientific and technical information among researchers in Morocco and eventually provide competitive intelligence for the country's business community. It was absolutely thrilling to participate in this national project, which will transform the Moroccan university library system and bring many of its activities on par with other countries. The project leader and I plan to continue the collaboration begun between IMIST and Seton Hall University and are planning further ways in which we can work together.
 

My son and I did a bit of traveling in our free time, visiting Marrakesh to the south and the nearby city of Casablanca. We grew to really love the beauty of the country, which is geographically very diverse and spent time with our hosts in their homes.

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