Bibliotheca Alexandrina exclusively launches the largest Arabic Digital Library worldwide, the Library now includes more than 150,000 fully searchable Arabic books online, which complies with its mission to avail knowledge for all. Anyone can browse any of this large collection online on the digital archive http://dar.bibalex.org created by the International School of Information Science (ISIS), a BA affiliated research institute, to hold this vast collection of books.
Digitizing the 100,000 books is a new breakthrough that goes in accordance with the new global perspective of today’s library. “This accomplishment overcomes the difficulty of obtaining the out-of-print books,” says Dr Serageldin, “or the highly specialized books that due to the scarce number of potential readers, they do not tempt publishers to invest in them, or the out-of copyright old books that need to be republished in smaller amounts.”, he resumed.
Creating the Arabic digital library and availing it online for all is considered a major contribution by Bibliotheca Alexandrina supporting the Arabic culture in the current digital era, as it faces up to the limited Arabic content on the Internet in comparison to other languages. In addition, it is considered an optimum tool for students, researchers, academics and the public in general, where the books cover various domains including, Human science, natural Sciences, history, arts, technology and applied science, religion, literature, generalities, etc.
In the same context, Dr Magdi Nagy, head of the ICT sector at Bibliotheca Alexandrina clarified that the developed search tool enables the user to reach the book of his interest easily through keywords, publisher name, author name, book title, year of release, etc. Dr Nagy added that ISIS team has also developed browsing tools and a book viewer for each book allowing users to zoom in and out the text for convenient reading, or search within the book for certain words or expressions, etc.
Visitors of the Arabic Digital Library can review the full searchable contents of books within the premises of the BA, while off the premises, the out-of-copyrights books only can be reviewed fully whereas the in-copyright material offer only 5% of its searchable content online. However, the BA is currently working on availing those in-copyrights books through ISIS’ project: Print On Demand, which according to the agreements settled with the publishers , the user will be able to order online the desired book to be printed out using the Espresso Book Machine, which can print a whole book of 200 pages in 20 minutes. The book is then to be sent to the user via the express mail, providing that half of the printing cost will be due to the author and publisher.
It is worth mentioning that the Arabic Digital Library has been created within the Digital Assets Repository system (DAR), which has been developed by the Information and Communication Technology sector at the BA. DAR creates and maintains the digital content of the BA that has been digitized and transformed into a new electronic context using the newest global technologies. DAR is considered the main framework within which the Arabic Digital Library has emerged. The system contains tens of thousands of documents and pictures, in addition to many complete projects such as the Memory of Modern Egypt repository, the Suez Canal digital archive, El Sadat digital archive, etc. You can review all these projects from their own URLs on ISIS website.
Bibliotheca Alexandrina was able to attract millions of users all over the world, which has required offering the highest quality digital content for their satisfaction. Hence, equipped with the highest technology ever existed, ISIS has created the Digital Laboratory that is considered the main operational scene behind the inception of the Arabic Digital Library. Thanks to the meticulous efforts of those working on it, the 100,000 digitized books have become today’s reality. And still counting……