Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 28 Sep. - 4 Oct. 2000 Issue No. 501
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Egyptian culture online

By Amina Elbendary

You've heard the stories, the ones about works of art mysteriously disappearing in the dark of the night, or the bright light of day, it really doesn't make a difference. You've heard officials lamenting that we don't really know what's lost of Egypt's cultural treasures because we don't really know what's there to begin with. You've heard the lamentations; you are now going to read about one of the remedies.

The Ministry of Culture, in conjunction with the Prime Ministry's Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC), has started an ambitious programme to document and catalogue Egypt's art and antiquities. It is an enormous task -- even for the country that practically invented bureaucracy. Perhaps this is why the ministry's programme is divided into clear phases, and it is approaching the project one step at a time. Indeed, it is not even clear that the project aims at producing an inventory of Egypt's treasures as such -- an arts archive-- but more of an overall assessment of what there is and an attempt to market it globally.

The real incentive behind the project seems to be less the desire for cataloguing and documentation per se, than a sense of urgency of the importance of joining the cyber revolution. Ours has been dubbed the information age, and the officials at the Ministry of Culture are acutely aware of the need to master the tools of that age. Thus a group of 18 dedicated and energetic young computer wizards sit daily at their state-of-the-art computer terminals at the arts database bank housed at the Mr and Mrs Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum premises. Their work is to produce a database of Egypt's cultural heritage; they enter data, scan photos, lay out pages, and design Web sites.

Promoting Egypt's cultural heritage is a strategic goal, argued Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni at the launching of the ministry's main cultural database this week. Available in digital format so far are The Encyclopaedia of Plastic Arts in the Twentieth Century and The Biographical Encyclopaedia of Egyptian Plastic Artists, as well as catalogues of several of the main exhibitions held in Cairo over the last few years including those of the Fayoum Portraits and the Cairo Biennales.

The Biographical Encyclopaedia of Egyptian Artists is a monumental work that divides artists into three generations, each arranged alphabetically. Searching the encyclopaedia for a particular name you will receive basic biographical information on the artist, in a disappointingly CV-like format including prizes and awards won. There is no attempt to furnish an artistic critique of their work, or to place it within any cultural framework. The entry also includes several photos of works by the artist, usually items in the collection of the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art.

Hosni stressed the importance of ensuring accuracy in compiling this data. Inaccuracy on the part of cultural officials, he commented, would be extremely harmful to Egypt's credibility in an age when information is globally available at the click of a mouse. According to Ahmed Nawar, head of the department of plastic arts, a committee of specialised experts was formed to revise all the data. It will, of course, be particularly interesting -- once the encyclopaedia is available to the public -- to find which artists have been deemed worthy of inclusion, and which have been ignored.

So far, it is not clear how the ministry plans to make use of and market this database to the public. Will it release the database in CD form? Will these CDs be subsidised? Are they planning to issue English and French editions in addition to the Arabic ones which have been accomplished? Translating the encyclopaediae, for example, would make them accessible to a far wider international audience.

The databases of all Egyptian museums, however, will be available in the form of Internet Web sites. The Web site of the Egyptian museum has been online since January at www.egyptianmuseum.gov.eg and the Mr and Mrs Mahmoud Khalil Museum (www.mkhalilmuseum.gov.eg) has been available since August. In addition, a site covering manuscripts held by Dar Al-Kutub is also functioning. According to Nawar, a new museum site will be launched every month. Thus, October will see the launching of the Web site of the Islamic Ceramics Museum at www.ic_islamicmus.gov.eg. Eventually all these Web sites will be linked together through a portal, facilitating navigation between Egyptian cultural sites.

The Egyptian Museum's official Web site is available in English only. It took many attempts to successfully log on to. The site boasts only 20,000 visitors since its launch in January, a limited figure considering the museum's treasures and Egypt's potentials. Interestingly, however, searches for the "Egyptian Museum" on several of the major search engines available did not list this official Web site, indicating that it is not well advertised or listed. The site includes few examples of artefacts from the main collections dating back to the Old Kingdom, the New Kingdom and so on. But the number of images available online is extremely meagre compared to the millions of artefacts in the possession of the museum. A brief description and analysis accompanies each piece's image but there is no guide as to where to actually find it in the building. Unfortunately, the visitor cannot go on a guided tour online. And while the site includes a floor map, the rooms on the plan aren't labelled, which rather defeats the purpose.

		Far left: a figure study by Milcendeau, listed as Daumier's Don Quixote; and a landscape drawing erroneously titled Branch of an Apple Tree

The Web site for the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil And His Wife Museum [sic] however, is available in Arabic, English and French. Yet, the information available on the art pieces housed at the museum is disappointingly brief. Under "collections," the surfer could view a very limited sample of the paintings, sculpture and lacquer work housed at the museum. The images are all stamp-sized, and the resolution insufficiently high. A search by artists' names is also available. But searching for Degas, for example, you get only basic biographical information on the painter, without the examples of his works housed at the museum.

Great efforts are being made by the team involved in setting up Egypt's cultural database, but they still have a long way to go. In this Information age competition is fierce and cut-throat, even for cultural products. It does not help, given the ministerial insistence on accuracy, that on the Mahmoud Khalil site, at least, a great many paintings are mislabelled: even the piece of the month, an anodyne 30's bit of post-Impressionism is claimed to be a work by Courbet. Under Daumier's Don Quixote what we actually get is a portrait by Milcendeau, whose name appears clearly on the frame.

Yet at this week's launch, the Minister of Culture spoke of the importance of the "production of culture," a term he used to refer to the marketing of cultural products in advanced technological format. Yet while the databases available so far are relatively competent technologically, a lot obviously still needs to be done in terms of content. Presenting cultural material in multi-media form necessitates a different conceptualisation than that used in preparing a printed catalogue of an exhibition, for example. And yet it would seem that at the back of the organisers' minds there was that rather simplistic idea: put the available catalogues online or print them on CDs, without, apparently, taking the opportunity to correct existing errors.

Certainly there is a need to encourage and foster the development of expertise in editing Web sites and digital material, which require very different skills to those of print publishing. By training a new generation of Web editors specialised in cultural material, the ministry would be rendering a great service to the future of education and culture in Egypt. There is, though, much ground to be covered before we can log on and be confident about the information we receive.

	weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg