The Path Taken and the Promising Road: Libraries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)

This paper discusses current directions, challenges, and future insights in libraries and librarianship in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region based on the authors’ research, knowledge, and experience. The authors gathered information from printed and electronic materials indexed in Arabic databases, talks and workshops at Arabic regional conferences, and expert comments. The collected data were analyzed using the content analysis method. They were categorized using an adaptation of the classification employed by the American Library Association’s Center for the Future of Libraries to make them easier to comprehend and examine library trends in depth. ALA’s acronym for its classification is STEEPED, which stands for Society, Technology, Education, Environment, Politics, Economics, Demographics, which due to the nature of the data collected was changed to STEEC (Society, Technology, Education, Economics, and Cultural Heritage). The findings enable librarians all over the world to gain more knowledge of the libraries in this region, especially given the paucity of research published in English.