The COMSt programme officially opened with a meeting of the representatives of the nine originally funding European countries on 3 June 2009 at the ESF headquarters in Strasbourg. The declared goals were to enable academic dialogue between scholars working in the same subdisciplines of manuscript studies applied to another language or region, as well as interdisciplinary communication; to establish a standard methodology for Oriental manuscript studies, too often confined to a narrow sectorial and regional dimension; and to make scholars more sensitive to the neighbouring fields and enable teamwork on regional and thematic levels.