Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Library of Congress Sign a Memorandum of Understanding to Create the World Digital Library
Posted on
Alexandria — Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Library of Congress signed a memorandum of understanding by which the BA is going to be one of the founding institutions of the World Digital Library. The World Digital Library will contain content related to the history and culture of peoples and countries around the world.
The two institutions will exchange information and ideas on issues such as standards, selection and presentation of content, multilingualism, and system architecture. They will also embark on completing a joint digital library project that will serve as one of the building blocks of the future digital library, and that will be used to develop and test standards, technologies, and procedures. The project will involve the digitization of rare and unique materials from the collections of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina relating to the history and culture of the city of Alexandria, Egypt, and the Middle East in general.
The two institutions will also collaborate to create two identical mirrored websites, one to be hosted at Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the other at the Library of Congress. These websites will present to the public, free of charge and in multilingual format, the digitized collections. The agreement will also cover issues such as standards, copyrights, maintenance of the sites, the relationship between these sites and the future World Digital Library, and financing and other support for the creation of these sites.
About the Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), the new Library of Alexandria, was inaugurated in 2002 to recapture the spirit of the ancient Library of Alexandria, a center of world learning from 300 BC to 400 AD. The new Library and its affiliated research centers are devoted to using the newest technology to preserve the past and to promote access to the products of the human intellect. It is committed to work with partners all over the world, and is a center for intercultural dialogue, learning and understanding.
For more information visit
http://www.bibalex.org.
About the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the oldest American federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of US Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with more than 130 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 29 million books and other printed materials, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 58 million manuscripts.
For more information visit
http://www.loc.gov.