New director for the Oriental Department of the Berlin State Library
Press release from 12/08/2009
At its meeting today, the Board of Trustees of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation unanimously elected 37-year-old Christoph Rauch as Head of the Oriental Department of the Berlin State Library. The position has been vacant since the departure of Dr Hartmut-Ortwin Feistel at the end of June 2008.
Rauch studied Arabic Studies, Oriental Philology and Religious Studies, including in Damascus, and graduated with a Master of Arts. He completed his education with a library traineeship. He has been a subject librarian for Arabic, Oriental and Islamic Studies at the Berlin State Library since March 2007.
The focus of his future work will be to further expand the collection and to further develop the electronic records of the manuscripts and their digital copies, also in the original language, in the catalogue system. His good knowledge of modern library information technology will be of great benefit here.
The Oriental Department of the Berlin State Library has one of the most important and best catalogued collections of its kind in Europe. This includes around 42,000 manuscripts from Africa to Asia, including unique Jewish manuscripts. In addition, the Oriental Department has around 750,000 volumes of printed material and an extensive collection of periodicals.