Bibliotheca Alexandrina Upgrades to 155 Mbps
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Alexandria, 27 January 2005— In pursuing the goal of becoming a world-wide leading institution of the digital age, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has successfully upgraded its Internet connection bandwidth from 10 Mbps to 155 Mbps (STM1) in cooperation with Telecom Egypt and generous support from the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT).
The upgrade places BA among the first few organizations in Egypt with STM1 connection, and the only cultural non-profit organization. The new bandwidth will allow for high-speed access to the wealth of information offered through BA serving both local as well as international communities.
The upgrade resulted in the enhancement of synchronization with the Internet Archive in San Francisco, which consists of a complete snapshot of all web pages on every website since 1996 till today. In addition, it is now possible to expand the archive collection by capturing web sites (crawling) from within BA. The upgrade will also enhance the quality of services provided by BA to its personal and online visitors. Electronic resources and digitized collections will be accessed quickly and efficiently from within the BA or through the Internet. Services such as web browsing, video conferencing and video streaming will become significantly faster. In addition, it will better support the hosting of websites developed in-house.
The better performance will also be beneficial to various digital projects taking place at BA. Examples include allowing BA to increase the number of kiosks connected to the Hole-in-the-Wall project; publishing digitized audio and video collections; and electronic publishing of digitized books.