Dr. Serageldin congratulates Tunisia on the Opening of its National Library
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Alexandria— Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director, the Library of Alexandria (Bibliotheca Alexandrina), delegated Dr. Khaled Azab, Head, BA Media Department and Deputy Director, BA Calligraphy Center, to attend the inauguration of the Tunisian National Library, in December 2005.
Dr. Serageldin donated a collection of the digital and printed publications of the BA to the new Tunisian National Library as means of cultural exchange between the two libraries. The collection comprises “Boulaq Press”, “History of Writing”, “Al Hambra Palace”, “Scripts” in addition to a collection of digitized manuscripts.
It is worth noting that the Tunisian National Library is one of the most advanced libraries in the Arab world when it comes to technical documentations, and the use of electronic searches, whether in-house or within other international libraries.
The library has reading halls, research rooms, auditoriums, art galleries, scientific exhibitions, and a manuscript center. It contains 24,000 Manuscript volumes under 40,000 titles, a million books, 16,000 periodicals, maps, compact discs, microfiche films, microfilms, and electronic periodicals.
Following the steps of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Tunisian National Library aims at developing a digital library. The library has already digitized some of masterpieces of the Arabic literature, as well as indexed a collection of periodicals, manuscripts, and publications of the library. The library has also prepared an electronic index to facilitate searching the Library’s collections.