Founded in 1987, the Middle East Materials Project (MEMP) works to provide digital and microform copies of rare, hard-to-obtain, and expensive research materials related to Middle Eastern Studies.
[1] MEMP is coordinated through the Center for Research Libraries in cooperation with the Middle East Librarians Association (MELA).
Members participate in cooperative cataloging of materials that require specialized linguistic and cultural knowledge.
[3] MEMP's collection includes over 100 newspaper titles in Arabic, Turkish, and English, a large number of Sudanese and Turkish papers, microfilms of documents about the Middle East from the Library of Congress, and microfilms from the Cosro Chaqeri Collection of Iranian Left-wing Materials.
MEMP has also worked with Fawzy W. Khoury and Michelle Bates to compile the "Middle East in Microform: a Union List of Middle Eastern Microforms in North American Libraries" (University of Washington Libraries, 1992), a revised and expanded version of "National Union Catalog of Middle Eastern Microforms" (University of Washington Libraries, 1989).