Window on the word
A year after the opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the virtual library is gaining prominence. Dena Rashed steps into the library's digital world
Inside the Bibliotheca Alexandrina young people are glued to computer screens. While some log on to the Internet for academic reasons, many others are here just for the fun of it. Speed is the attraction; the Internet connection at the Bibliotheca is faster, many times faster, than what most people can get at home.
Noha Adly, the head of the Information Technology Department told Al-Ahram Weekly, "The Bibliotheca Alexandrina certainly has one of the fastest Internet connections in Egypt at a speed of 10 megabytes per second," compared with the standard 56K dial-up connections on most home computers.
Although printers had originally been publicly available, the service was suspended after wasteful abuse. Many of the Internet users were printing documents they did not want or need. "We found ourselves with a lot of wasted paper on our hands," explained Adly. The Bibliotheca plans to introduce prepaid print cards in the coming months.
Although most of those interviewed by the Weekly at the Bibliotheca said they owned computers and had access to the Internet at home, they still preferred the library.
"Here I can stay on the Internet for a maximum two hours and this service is quieter, faster and better," said Mostafa Hassan, an engineering student.
For some, the library has turned into a cheap Internet café; pay the LE2 Bibliotheca entrance fee and enjoy free Internet access. Although the major chatting rooms are blocked on library terminals, Hassan found a loophole in the system. "We adopted a certain approach to deal with the usage of the Internet area as an Internet café: let the users play until they get bored and decide to log on for academic reasons." said Adly. "Besides the Internet is protected by two firewalls that block those sites deemed undesirable by our culture. That basically includes pornographic sites."
She added that there are two ways of monitoring the Internet service: through staff members who make sure the users will not abuse either the Internet service or the computers, as well as a list of sites prohibited by the library.
Other arrangements have been made for researchers enrolled in academic programmes, providing them with separate study rooms equipped with printers for a fee. "The study rooms are basically designed not to become cheap Internet cafés," added Adly.
As Adly explained, "Our goal was optimistic from the start: to become a window for Egypt onto the world, a window for the world onto Egypt."
The IT project started with a strong fiber optic based network, and 800 computers, divided between the public and the staff, with an additional 200 public computers in the works.
What services are allowed to be put on the Web site of the Bibliotheca is still an important question. "The copyright of many books remains an issue that has to be solved before we introduce them on the Web site," explained Adly.
However, the Bibliotheca Web site remains a valuable tool for learning about the structure of the library, its contents, and the services it provides. (see box)
The Bibliotheca Web site is not the only digitally accessible knowledge provided by the library. The Internet Archive (IA), developed under the theme of "Universal Access to Human Knowledge", is one of the most ambitious projects of the Bibliotheca, aiming at opening up another window for Egypt onto the world. The IA was made possible by a $5 million donation by Brewster Khlae of the United States.
On the second floor of the Bibliotheca, two big plasma screens and three flat panels flash every few seconds with the sites available through the IA. "The IA is a complete snapshot of all the Web pages that appeared on every Web site since 1996," explained Khaled El-Gazzar, a software engineer at the Bibliotheca. "It gives the users a collection of millions of Web pages over the last seven years."
El-Gazzar pointed out that in light of continual change on the Internet, Web snapshots are retaken every two months, giving the collection three times more text pages than all the books in the world's largest print library, the US Library of Congress. Although they are not the same pages as the books, the comparison gives a sense of the vast amount of data available on the Internet Archive. With 100 terabytes of data stored on 200 computers, the IA aims at including the main part of the World Wide Web. One of the other valuable research tools for users of the Bibliotheca is the Wayback Machine. It is a user interface on top of the Web collection, through which users can surf the Web as it was.
Other alternatives provided by the IA is the possibility of logging on to the TV archive, which contains two months of DVD quality Worldnet and one month of Egyptian Television broadcasts. The news broadcasts are available on the Internet, but can only be viewed in the Bibliotheca.
The IA also provides Bibliotheca users the Movie Archive, including 1000 movies illustrating the culture and the history of the United States in the 20th century. "It would take days to download from home connections, but only a few minutes from the library," said El-Gazzar. The draw back is that the Movie Archive is limited to American films only. Copyright issues hinder the availability of Egyptian documentaries for Movie Archive users.
In addition, the library expects to launch a new project in October aimed at making children more comfortable with books and computers at the same time. "It is a mobile book making station, where the child gets to choose a book available on the Internet, print it, and turn it into a book of his or her own," said Adly. The project, she explained, will be available at the Bibliotheca and in a mobile van that will tour the districts for free. "It will certainly make children more interested in computers and more attached to the books they make on their own," she said.
Bibliotheca Alexandrina: www.bibalex.org.eg
Web archive: archive.bibalex.org
TV archive: archive.bibalex.org/tv
Movie archive: archive.bibalex.org/movie
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 9 - 15 October 2003 (Issue No. 659)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/659/sc52.htm