With Mohamed Saber Arab approaching retirement, the new minister of culture, Shaker Abdel-Hamid, has appointed Zein Abdel-Hadi to head the Egyptian Library and Archives.

Abdel-Hadi had previously headed up the Library's central department and worked as a professor of information sciences and supervised the Librarians' Department at the Faculty of Literature in Helwan University. Abdel-Hadi began his assignment on Friday, confirming that his first concern is to catalogue the losses incurred during the fire at the Egyptian Science Institute, as well as start the restoration process of the books salvaged and now kept at the Library, which could take several weeks.