On October 2, 2009, an open lecture meeting “From Papyrus to PDF: The Rebirth of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina” was held in the Tokyo Main Library, inviting Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Following the lecture meeting, there was an open discussion by Dr. Serageldin and Dr. Makoto Nagao, Librarian of the NDL.

Dr. Serageldin began his lecture by introducing the Ancient Library of Alexandria, and proceeded to elaborate how the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) is trying to resurrect the spirit and aspiration of its predecessor in the digital age.

Here are outlines of his lecture and the discussion held in the Tokyo Main Library.

The story of the Ancient Library of Alexandria starts with the conquest of Alexander the Great. He was not just a conqueror: being a student of Aristotle, he had the vision of the world culture in that new empire.

After his death, it was left to one of his successors, Ptolemy I Soter, who ruled Egypt, to implement his vision. Upon the advice of Demetrius of Phaleron, he created a temple dedicated to the Muses, called the Mouseion, which was a part academy, a part library and a part “think-tank”. Under Ptolemy II, the Museion grew exponentially, and its library aspired to collect all the books of the world. Thus the library started as a part of a far bigger academic enterprise even though the name of “library” was paramount.

The library held over 700,000 scrolls, 7-8 scrolls being the equivalent of a book of 300 octavo pages. This made it the largest library ever in proportion to the world knowledge at this time. As the Library grew they built two additional libraries.

Little remains physically of the Ancient Library now. The Library was destroyed in a slow gradual decline over four centuries and by three major events including Alexandrian War between Cleopatra supported by Julius Caesar, and her brother. What remained by the end of 4th century were a few private papers in the hands of scholars for one more generation until the tragedy of Hypatia, another great lady scholar to grace the history of Alexandria. Upon her death by a Christian mob, all the scholars fled the city, marking the end of Alexandrian world class scholarship and the beginning of the Dark Ages.

We owe much to Mrs. Suzanne Mubarak, the first lady of Egypt who made it a personal campaign to revive the Library of Alexandria. She now chairs the BA Board of Trustees.

At the time Mrs. Mubarak started talking about rebuilding the Library, it was assumed that great libraries were repositories of books with vast reading rooms where knowledge was divided up into individual volumes. Although the value of a book remains unchanged, we began to see changes: carrels appearing with computers, old card catalogues giving way to the new form: the OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog),as everything becomes digital.

The Internet is the most transformative innovation of the last century that really changed the world. However, its very contestable quality and largely variable content remain a problem. The Digital Future is unstoppable; the question is to think about how we can play our role constructively within it.

Now, Google. It is not only a great search engine, but it also has a massive book digitization program which impacts on the whole notion of publishing and what the future will look like. We can also expect electronic books to make a comeback.

The implication for libraries? They will become content providers in the new digital era, as well as organizers of coherent bodies of knowledge. Now with that background, how did we create the new Library of Alexandria?

up

For the reconstruction of the library, we held a competition that resulted into the design and construction of a landmark building.

The building's curve is covered on the outside with an elegant granite wall engraved with letters of alphabets from all over the world to remind us to be open to the cultures of the world. As we intend to reclaim the spirit of its ancient predecessor, it has to be much more than a library. There is a center for Internet archive, a conference center, a planetarium, museums and art galleries and research institutes. We receive a lot of visitors: annually, 1.2 million visitors including 400,000 reader visits, over 300 million hits on our website, 700 events, not counting educational courses and 316 art school activities but including concerts, international gatherings and book fairs. We have also become a hub for national, regional and international collaboration networks. Thus the Library is a complex of library institutions that interact together, starting with a hybrid library where computers and traditional reading tables co-exist.

We have specialized libraries: the Library for the Blind and Visually-Impaired, the Children’s Library (5-11 years old), the Young People’s Library (12-16 years old), the Multi-Media (AV-Music) Library, Rare Books, and we also have microforms.

We have four museums: the Sadat Museum, Manuscript Museum, Antiquities Museum and Science Museum combined with the planetarium and the exploratorium. We also have nine permanent exhibitions and four temporary exhibitions.

In addition, we have several institutes; Manuscripts, Calligraphy and Writing, Special Studies (a virtual center connecting people all around the world with researchers and scientists of Egypt), Documentation which has patented Culturama, ISIS (International School of Information Science), Art Center which handles schooling for children, Alex-Med which studies the role of Alexandria in the Mediterranean both ancient and modern. There is also the Dialogue Forum which mobilizes Egypt’s intellectuals to uphold Human Rights and Freedom of Expression when they are under attack.

We also host the Arab Info Mall, an Arab civil society meeting point interconnecting 1,500 NGOs. We are creating new research centers such as an institute for Hellenistic studies to study the glorious history of the city of Alexandria and its legendary Ancient Library.

But we need to reach further, hence the mass media. We have two weekly TV programs: one is a discussion program that I do, and the other is a weekly program on what’s new at the Library. We decided that the BA needs its own TV Studio and now it is under construction.
(Update on the matter: BA has been able to set-up a full-fledged cutting-edge studio in a record time. The studio is now successfully operating to screen, edit and produce many episodes of the library’s weekly programs. BA is now preparing for a new TV Science Series which will focus on tracing the development of different fields of science throughout the years as well as on highlighting most influential scientists throughout history and their main contributions to science. The new TV Science Series named “Horizons” will be fully produced in the new studio facility at the BA.)

Generally speaking, the BA is becoming a venue for eminent intellectuals, political figures and Nobel laureates from all over the world. We founded a new institution: the Academia Bibliotheca Alexandrinae with 40 founders, 20 of them Nobel Laureates.

But being born digital means commitment to access to all information for all people at all times! Therefore, we have created the biggest digital library of Arabic materials in the world, which has now reached more than 125,000 books all online.

Being born digital also means honoring the past, celebrating the present and embracing the future. For honoring the past, we have such projects as the Digital Manuscripts Library, Archeological Map of Egypt, the Natural Heritage of Egypt and Arabic Music National Database. We also have the Memory of Modern Egypt program which is similar to the World Digital Library except that it is available only in Arabic.

We celebrate the present by working with others such as the Million Book Project in which we digitized 120,000 books, by maintaining the Internet Archive to ensure that it will never disappear, and by working on Access To Knowledge initiatives. We are also trying to design Science Supercourses that are made freely available worldwide online and on DVDs. We are also customizing the Development Gateway with the World Bank for the Arab World.

Now we embrace the future by defending our values against obscurantism, fanaticism and xenophobia. We strengthen the role of women wherever we can, and we link people together by the Arab Info Mall. We also help teach children better with the National Academy of Sciences of France by Arabizing the LAMAP website, the Academy’s educational website promoting scientific investigation within the framework of primary school education.
(The LAMAP is a French website initiated in 1996 by Georges Charpak, Nobel laureate of physics in 1992, to provide essential resources necessary for the development of science teaching.)

We are also eager to acquire tools for tomorrow. We are working with the UN University in Tokyo on the UNDL (Universal Networking Digital Language) which enables all people to generate information and have access to cultural knowledge in their native languages through an automatic translation system. We also have the second prototype Espresso Book Machine to provide a print-on-demand service within the library of selected digital materials. All you have to do is to overcome the copyright issue. It allows us to reissue out-of-print classics.

We have systematically created an infrastructure for science. We offer 45,000 journals online in full-text, large computing capability provided by our own supercomputer, a very developed analytical center which we call the VISTA (Virtual Immersive Science & Technology Applications), large storage capacity for Internet archiving, and last but not least large-bandwidth connectivity which allows us to connect to the rest of the science world.

We are very proud to be, with the National Diet Library and the Library of Congress (LC), a part of the World Digital Library (WDL). It was really a visionary initiative by James Billington, the Librarian of the Congress supported by UNESCO. The aim is to create a meeting point for cultures around the world and make the different cultural materials available for free on the Internet. We are much honored that the WDL Agreement asked the Library of Alexandria to work on technical issues of the central hub.

The site offers advanced search and browse features in seven languages and the content itself is in more than two dozen languages. It was officially launched in April 2009 and is accessible online at www.wdl.org.

Thus the BA, which is born digital, is proud to join the builders of a better future. By providing universal access to all knowledge for all people at all times, working all together, there is so much that we can do for a whole generation and for the whole world.

up

Dr. Nagao: It seems the ancient spirit of the Mouseion has been resurrected.
Now, may I ask you the size of the budgets and personnel in the BA?

Dr. Serageldin: The BA has about 2,000 staff working in Cairo and Alexandria. We have 220 in security, 100 or so in house-keeping; the remaining staff are at average age of 30, 51% of them are women. Secondly, we pay regular Egyptian salaries for the staff; the young engineer earns around $300 a month. We run the whole place, all these programs and things at $20 million a year.

Dr. Nagao: Do you have any IT team? If you do, what is the role they play in the scheme of the BA? Are they librarians proficient in IT or are they different categories of staff, with librarians not directly involved in IT fields?

Dr. Serageldin: That is an important question. We have probably the best IT team in Egypt. There are around 300 engineers devoted purely to IT. We have over 2,800 computers in the building to be maintained and VISTA, Culturama also use computerized systems. They also provide assistance to the LC on the WDL. There is a complementarity of roles between librarians and IT staff in which librarians request IT staff to add some features to the system and the latter oblige. The IT staff also work with scientists on some virtual reality systems.

Dr. Nagao: How enviable. My next question is on digitization. Do you administer digitization program as a regular operation or do you outsource it?

Dr. Serageldin: We do it in the Library. In fact, we are extremely good at it. When we worked on the Million Book Project, we had 2% of equipment deployed but we produced 5% of the work.

Dr. Nagao: Let me add that the Million Book Project was run by Carnegie Mellon University to digitize about one million books. Now I would like to ask how much role do digitized materials play in school education in Egypt?

Dr. Serageldin: What we have done is Arabizing of materials on the LAMAP, the website of the National Academy of Science in France. But it is intended to be used by teachers, the same thing again with the Supercourse. But we have not reached the stage of using digitized materials in school.

Dr. Nagao: We cannot introduce lending of digitized data from the NDL to public libraries and schools because of copyright law. Is it possible to digitally transmit copyrighted materials in Egypt?

Dr. Serageldin: No. Our current arrangement is that out of 125,000 materials available on the Internet, out-of-copyright materials are available fully, 5% of non-out-of-copyright ones can be read and the rest can be ordered to be copied. We will print it by the Espresso Book Machine. I have an agreement with publishers, printers and authors. My vision of the future is that we should have everything available online but people must pay for download, either to a personal reader or into a printed copy.
Ideally printing machines will be as ubiquitous as ATMs for banks, with pre-approved arrangements to benefit author, publisher and other stakeholders. But at present, I am having a tough time in reaching an agreement with publisher after publisher.

Dr. Nagao: The situation is the same in Japan. Are printing machines that can copy books already a common sight in Egypt?

Dr. Serageldin: Not yet, but we are almost there. OnDemandBooks is negotiating directly with Google which has millions of books. I expect a lot of movement on this issue within 5-10 years.

up

Dr. Nagao: I think access to digitized library materials must be provided within a framework in which publishers and authors do not lose out. I proposed a business model to protect their interest two years ago. Is this the direction Egypt is looking at?

Dr. Serageldin: Yes, it is. I also know an alternative which is the Norwegian approach; the government levies a tax and pays the sum to authors, thereby making a number of books free. There is another model deserving to be looked at on translation. There is a provision in Egyptian law which enables unpermitted translation of a material following three years of refusal by copyright holders. The U.S. is pressing us to change it. But I had debates on the matter and found that it is publishers, not authors, who are objecting it. But then, we give them 3 years to do it themselves.

Dr. Nagao: A similar discussion is going forward in Japan. Now that you mentioned Google, there are incendiary issues surrounding the company in Japan as well as the U.S. and Europe. Especially in France, there is disquiet over the alleged linguistic supremacy of English. They argue that such preference fosters dominance of the English language and is detrimental to cultural diversity. Do you have similar arguments in Arab-speaking countries?

Dr. Serageldin: Not quite. There is a general feeling that Arabic e-content is so weak right now that the chance of getting it on non-Arabic search engines is limited. But I come back to the WDL. I think that is the way to present all the cultures of the world together. There is no reason why it will not host hundreds of millions of items in 50 years’ time. The way it will be structured and navigated is respectful of other cultures, builds upon diversity and respects the uniqueness of each language.

Dr. Nagao: I am wondering who will take the role of organizing and structuring the knowledge stored in the WDL?

Dr. Serageldin: Under the new charter drafted for the whole WDL, there will be a governing body with a rotating membership tasked to look at the issue. Secondly, there is a brilliant feature of the WDL: it focused from the beginning not just on searching but on browsing. Like regular libraries where you can look at a cluster of books around the one you pick, the WDL navigates you around the related subject.

Dr. Nagao: I appreciate your unique viewpoint on browsing. Now, there is another transnational endeavor to establish a digital library: Europeana. What is the relationship between the WDL and Europeana?

Dr. Serageldin: There is no official relationship and in certain ways, Europeana is a competitor. In any case, Europeana faces much more difficult technical problems with language: they have volumes of work growing exponentially on the one hand, and 27 languages of the European Union to represent on the other. I think they can co-exist for awhile. But I am more interested in the WDL as it allows me to see the whole world.

Dr. Nagao: Speaking of languages, the NDL too has just started discussion with the National Libraries of China and Korea to coordinate search interfaces and share resources as we all belong to the Chinese Character Cultural Sphere. Is there a similar initiative on collaboration in Arab-speaking countries?

Dr. Serageldin: In fact, we are right now working on the Arabic Union Catalog. Although our own cataloging is recognized as one of the most authoritative in the Arabic countries, we need to standardize it with other countries’. We are also looking at the idea that we collaborate on digitization of our own materials.

Dr. Nagao: There is a high expectation for digitization. As we are awarded a supplementary budget to carry out large-scale digitization, there is a demand from the visually-handicapped people that we convert books into DAISY, a digital talking book format.

Dr. Serageldin: We have a program supported by the Islamic Development Bank of Jeddah for bringing a machine to convert text to sound, and we are looking at the possibility of programming a text-to-sound digital reader which is 98% accurate. But people seem to prefer a human voice reading. We have large number of voluntary readers who brings in emotions and inflections. This is where we are now.

Dr. Nagao: Do you provide digital materials for disabled people via public libraries? In Japan, copyright law has been changed recently so that public libraries can produce digitized materials and make them available at other libraries. I expect it to initiate a surge in the transmission of the digital materials between public libraries.

Dr. Serageldin: I do hope so. Meanwhile, until we get to that point, one thing the BA can do is to distribute DVDs containing materials for free like we did for the Supercourse. We sent thousands of DVDs to the deans of medical schools with a request to make five copies for each staff member, resulting in 500,000 DVDs going around the world. I think we can do the same with audio-books.

Dr. Nagao: I find this Supercourse fascinating. Do you provide it to each stage of education from elementary school to university?

Dr. Serageldin: It is for community of practice, which means high school to graduate school. The key thing is we can make available very up-to-date lectures by experts in easily usable format for free. It is targeted at teachers who are free to use the teaching materials on DVD per se or arrange them to their liking.

Dr. Nagao: Now let us change the topic. The BA is a comprehensive cultural institute containing museums and archives alongside the library. In Japan, we have no such equivalent and MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives) partnership is an often-discussed topic. In other words, we need to integrate the services of each institute as our services become more and more digital. Does the BA have any clues as to providing such total service?

Dr. Serageldin: What we know is that tools are complementary and there is an administrative difficulty in organizing all those materials because the staff in charge, be it librarians, curators, scientists or IT engineers, come from different institutional backgrounds.

Currently we have agreements with seven museums to create the GEM (Great Egyptian Museum) . It is based on the idea that they will digitize all their collections on Egypt. The first step is to make that information available together. The next step is to link the artefacts in the museum to relevant literature. These are all promises we have hardly embarked upon. But what we can barely dream of today will be a solid reality within a few years considering the rapid advance of computing capacity. Obstacles are institutional cultures, copyrights, agreements and the like.

My concluding statement is this: those who try to defend the old system of copyright are dinosaurs. You cannot defend an old business model against new technology. New technology always wins. Sooner or later, people must come together. The frustration is, it is done haphazardly by young people outside the law. It must be done by thoughtful people within a legal framework to advance the best of culture. I think it is our duty. There is a lot of fighting ahead of us but we are going to win.

The report of this lecture and discussion will also be published in NDL Monthly Bulletin no. 587, February (in Japanese).

up