Alexandrina on internet.

11 Nov, 2008

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina in the northern Egyptian city of Alexandria has launched a website in Arabic dedicated to the recent history of the country. The Memory of Modern Egypt digital archive contains 11,000 documents, over 20,000 photographs, 1,200 essays and biographies and 5,800 news clippings from 1802, when Egypt was restored to the Ottoman empire following the Napoleonic invasion, to 1981, the year of the assassination of president Anwar Sadat and the imposition of the state of emergency (which is still in force today). Other materials contained in the archive include digitised images of coins and stamps, audio and video files and historical studies commissioned specially for the project. The website has been put together over a period of three years at a cost of over LE1.5 million and is accessible to the public free of charge.