Nat’l library chief calls for regional cultural cooperation, digital overhaul
Iran’s national library chief Gholamreza Amirkhani opened the seventh Conference of National Library Directors of ECO member states in the Turkish capital on Thursday, calling for “real cultural synergy” across the region and urging libraries to embrace a decisive digital shift to safeguard their shared documentary heritage.
Amirkhani anchored his remarks in the long-standing cultural ties binding Iran, Türkiye, Central Asia and the Caucasus, IRNA reported.
He argued that national libraries hold a strategic responsibility to protect the region’s “collective memory”, broaden access to knowledge and support diverse social groups through inclusive cultural programs.
“We cannot afford to drift apart when our written heritage has tied us together for centuries,” he said, pushing delegates to “move beyond polite cooperation”.
He used the Ankara gathering to set out Tehran’s current work on manuscript preservation and bibliographic modernization. The organization, he said, has spent the past year expanding pre-publication cataloguing, tightening legal deposit workflows and building a more coherent national collection.
New digital services for provincial centers and the updated Iran’s national standard aim to pull scattered resources into a unified system that researchers can trust.
During a plenary session on digital transformation, Amirkhani pressed national libraries to overhaul legacy systems and adopt serious technological tools, from mass-digitization lines and intelligent environmental-control systems to advanced forensic imaging used in manuscript analysis.
These measures, he said, help institutions keep pace with rising user expectations and protect fragile archival material from environmental stress, uncontrolled handling and regional security risks.
He also singled out Iran’s recent bilateral projects with Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Uzbekistan and Russia, saying that practical, small-scale joint ventures, shared cataloguing, staff exchanges and cross-border training, “do far more than ceremonial agreements”.
Such cooperation, he argued, helps countries pool specialized knowledge and spread the costs of preservation technologies that many institutions cannot shoulder alone.
Delegates from ECO states, including the director-general of Turkey’s National Library and a representative from its Culture and Tourism Ministry, spent the first day working through national statements, thematic panels and proposals for new joint working groups. Members later voted for Kazakhstan to host the next round of meetings.