ALEXANDRIA, Egypt, April 20 (UPI) -- Whether the contents of the original Alexandria Library of antiquity burned up in a violent conflagration or just mouldered away through neglect, history shows that storing documents on papyrus and parchment isn't the best way to make information last.
The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, recently completed in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria at a cost of $200 million, has of course the latest in fire fighting and manuscript preservation technology so that its growing collection won't have to fear the elements. However, information in this library will for the most part not be stored in perishable paper formats, but rather the focus will be on massive amounts of digital information.
On April 20, the library announced a partnership with the California-based Internet Archive, IA, that will provide the Bibliotheca with an information gift worth $5 million consisting of IA's entire archive of the world wide web from 1996-2001, 2,000 hours of Egyptian and U.S. television, 1,000 American archival films and a book scanning facility.
"The key words are preservation and access, this is the basis of our partnership," said library director Ismail Serageldin, a former vice president of the World Bank. The Web archive as well as the movies and TV programs would be made available to the world either at the library itself or through its Web site (www.bibalex.org).
IA takes a snapshot of the Web every two months because old pages are constantly expiring and new pages are being born. In this manner information that would otherwise be lost is preserved, which makes for a very large archive of some 100 terabytes, or 100 million megabytes of information. This is the equivalent of a 100 million volumes, more than four times the number of books in the Library of Congress, still the world's largest library of physical books.
While the Alexandria Library has an eventual capacity of 8 million volumes, its current collection is only a quarter million books, as well as several collections of rare manuscripts and archives donated by various nations. The donation makes the Library the only other site of this material in the world besides the original IA location in California and is a major step forward in the library's effort to be a center of digital knowledge. The archive will be continuously updated at a rate of 10 terabytes of information a month.
"The idea of collecting all the knowledge of all the people in the world is in our grasp," announced Brewster Kahle, the founder of IA. His foundation decided to form a partnership with the library because of its commitment to the ideals of the original library to be a universal depository of knowledge. "No other library really tries for universality," he explained.
Other elements of the partnership will include sending trainees from Egypt to California and a project in cooperation with Carnegie Mellon University to scan a million books over the next five years.
The new incarnation of the Alexandria Library has long been in search for a niche. When it was originally conceived many critics questioned the utility of a large library in a country that wouldn't be able to give it a budget to compete with other knowledge centers in the world. There was talk of making it a center for research on Mediterranean cultures, but most of the valuable archives of material are at other institutions.
Under its new director, Ismail Serageldin, the library appears to have found a new direction by aggressively promoting itself as the first "truly digital library for the 21st century." As much as possible, works are going to be scanned and digitized so that they can be made available to scholars and general readers all over the world.
Kahle explains that the idea of total access to information has been behind libraries from the beginning, but "up until now its not really been true." Soon, however, he envisioned a time when "people in remote areas of Yemen will be able to walk a day and have access to the latest medical texts."
The physical structure of the library itself will serve as a locus for human interaction of experts and researchers who can meet and debate in person or online. "We aspire to recapture the spirit of the ancient library," says Serageldin.
One way in which the library will be different from its predecessor, however, is that it will be open to ordinary people. The original library was a scholars-only affair, with the notion of public libraries only becoming widespread in the 19th century. This was to be originally the case with the new library, but under Serageldin's direction it appears to be more directed towards a wider audience.
With most of its information in digital form it could potential reach an incredibly vast audience around the world and also its information will be kept safe from the ravages of time.
