Serageldin talks about Alexandria Library at Stanford

Dr. Ismail Serageldin gave an informative and moving talk at Stanford on Dec. 2nd about the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which he founded and still leads.

Inspired by the ancient Museum and Library, which thrived for centuries not only as the world's greatest repository of scrolls and books, but also as a gathering place for the leading scholars from different disciplines and different cultures, the new Library is an attempt to re-imagine what such a center of learning would look like if it could take full advantage of today's revolutionary technologies for managing, distributing, and accessing information.  The mission of the Library, as stated by Serageldin, is to provide "Access to all information for all people at all times."

The library complex, housed in a magnificent new building in Alexandria, includes not just a collection of millions of books, but also conference facilities, research institutes, four museums, a planetarium, an exploratorium (modeled after San Francisco's), a TV studio, a web site, and a copy of the Internet Archives (which tries to preserve snapshots of the incredibly voluminous and volatile information residing on the Web).  The Library has a staff of 2000 people, and receives 1.2 million visitors a year.

The Library is involved in many interesting projects that are pushing the edge of new technologies.  A few of the most notable are:

• The creation of "Supercourses" that are available on-line and on DVDs. These courses include thousands of lectures and can provide access to learning to hundreds of thousands of students.
• The development of a "Universal Networking Language" to facilitate the automatic translation of texts from many different languages into many other different languages.  Instead of laboriously developing translators that are specific to each unique pair of languages, the UNL requires only one translation mechanism (i.e., to and from UNL) for each new language that is added.
• The World Digital Library is a collaborative effort to capture high-quality digital images of important documents, books, maps, etc. from around the world, so that scholars (and ordinary students) from around the world can examine these works in great detail without needing to be physically in the same place.