Thank you, Professor Bodman. I should like to add my thanks also to Professor Adele Ferdows and her Committee, to the University of Louisville, for their thoughtful local arrangements, and to Professor Bodman and his Program Committee for their good work.

This paper contains information and observations on the problems and difficulties which university libraries and research centers encounter in trying to collect Persian materials. Hopefully, it can provide necessary information, description of basic tools useful to collections outside Iran, and also precise techniques to follow to build a decent and useful Iranian studies collection.

A confluence of three sorts of factors has made the past eightteen months a particularly appropriate period for the Ford Foundation to reconsider the magnitude and character of its support for research and training in the United States on the Middle East and Africa. The first of these is that dramatic developments during the past two years involving the Middle East and Africa have heightened public awareness of the critical impact events in these regions will have on the world. The second factor is that the Foundation’s program of general support to meet the core operating costs of African studies centers and Middle East studies centers has drawn to a close. Third, faced with the prospect of drastically reduced budgetary resources, the Foundation staff has had to confront the question of which of its activities should survive or be reshaped in the face of competing claims on scarcer resources. Transcending these three factors and less directly tied to the exigencies of the time is the conviction on the part of the Foundation that there is creative and important work to be done in this sphere and that the Foundation’s staff needs to think hard about past activities and future possibilities so that valuable opportunities do not pass us by.

The published literature—books, articles and monographs—in the French language on the Near East and North Africa is well-known and of remarkable value to the scholar and traveler interested in the Islamic world. Less accessible and, of course, less well-known, particularly in anglophone countries, are the often unpublished doctoral dissertations submitted to French universities. It has thus seemed useful to prepare a short bibliography covering some of the more recently completed thesis. The list is not exhaustive, even within the social sciences and humanities, and some of the citations are incomplete although, hopefully, not too often inaccurate. The dissertations covered are the Doctorat d’état, roughly equivalent to the Ph.D., the Doctorat d’université, and the Doctorat de specialité (3ème cycle). The legal and other requirements for the degrees are available in considerable detail in the Journal officiel de la République Française, May 2, 1974, pp. 4668–4672.