The whole catalogue, laid out as a single page.

• Scope fixed at the start. If the brief expands during delivery, we issue a revised quote rather than re-scope inside the original brief.
• Payment in advance for first-time clients. Repeat clients are billed net 14 against the Cairo bank account on the invoice.
• Currency. Egyptian pounds for Egyptian-resident clients; euros, US dollars or pounds sterling by SWIFT for international clients.
• Refund policy. Planner briefs are refundable in full if not delivered within the 24-hour window. Gallery-route memos and guide vetting are non-refundable once started. Translation is refundable if we miss the agreed delivery date.
• Confidentiality. Anything you send in connection with a service order stays in the desk file and is not used in archive editorial work without your written permission.
• Right to refuse. We decline work whose purpose is dressing commercial tour marketing as research, and we have refused a small number of such approaches.

The four core publication series we index in full are: the bilingual Annales Islamologiques published by the Institut français d'archéologie orientale in Cairo, which since 1954 has been the principal academic journal for Islamic-art studies in Egypt; the Bulletin de la Société d'archéologie copte, the equivalent journal of record for Coptic studies; the monthly SCA Historic Cairo Arabic-language bulletins from 2010 onward; and the published proceedings of the international conferences on Cairene material culture held alternately at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the American Research Center in Egypt since 2006. Outside these we index any peer-reviewed publication that names one of our seven covered institutions; the index has approximately 1,420 entries at the date of this page.

What we deliberately do not include: travel-blog posts, content-marketing pages from tour operators, unsourced compilations, and online encyclopedias that themselves cite none of the above. The point of an academic-grade index is that every entry can be verified at the holding library. We do include the popular Egyptian-Arabic monthly Turath (1998–2015) and its successor al-Athar (2018–present), because their architectural-history reportage on Cairene buildings is contemporaneous and is not otherwise preserved in English.

The most-used section of the index is the Museum of Islamic Art concordance, which maps every published reference to a specific object in the museum's collection against its current case number, gallery, and conservation status. The concordance has 2,840 individual-object records cross-referenced against the published catalogue volumes. Scholars planning a research visit use this resource to prepare a sensible list of cases to study; we run an average of 47 lookups per year on subscribers' behalf through this section. Library and Field subscribers can request a consolidated PDF for their topic.

The Coptic Museum concordance is smaller (1,180 entries) but disproportionately useful for textile studies. The Nag Hammadi codex section alone runs to 320 cross-references mapping each codex page to its publication state and current conservation routine. Subscribers preparing applications for codex consultation through the Coptic Museum curatorial office use this section extensively, and most successful applications since 2018 have been prepared with the desk's concordance as a working bibliography.

The third recurring use of the bibliography is the Al-Mu'izz Street monument concordance, which maps each of the approximately forty pre-modern monuments visible from the pedestrianised street against its index number in the Comité de Conservation des Monuments de l'Art Arabe (the historical Egyptian heritage commission that catalogued the city from 1882 onward). Architectural historians and graduate students preparing dissertations on the Mamluk and Ottoman building traditions of Cairo work with this concordance as a starting point.

Subscribers at Library and Field tiers can request a consolidated PDF of any concordance subset, delivered within two working days; Reader-tier subscribers can request individual entries on a one-off basis through the desk at no charge. The cumulative count of fulfilled requests since the system was introduced in 2018 is 184, including 26 in the current calendar year.

The bibliographic system is, in our subscribers' own words, the single thing this desk does that no other reference in the Islamic/Coptic Cairo space provides, and the reason most subscribers stay past the first month. It exists because Dr. Abdelhamid built the first version of it during his time at the Museum of Islamic Art curatorial office, and brought the methodology with him when the desk was founded in 2014. The maintenance work behind the index — the quarterly cross-checks against new publications, the verification of object case-numbers, the conservation-status updates — is genuinely labour-intensive and is the principal reason the subscription pricing has the structure it does.