Al-Hilal Digital Archive

Do you like tracing old magazines, discovering what were the predominating issues in the Arab World's social and political arenas over the past 100 years, or reading articles for eminent writers and tracing how journal writing developed? You can do all this and more through Al-Hilal Digital Archive.

Why Al-Hilal magazine?
Al-Hilal is considered the oldest cultural journal in the Arab world, and the only journal that has been issued regularly for more than a hundred years. Since its first publication in 1892, Al- Hilal magazine had a marked effect on the history of the Arab world in general and the history of Egypt in particular. It also played a leading role in modernizing Arab intellectual thinking, and opened new collaborations towards the cultural evolution.

The digital copy
Following an agreement concluded between the BA Manuscript Center and Dar Al-Hilal (the magazine publisher), ISIS started to work on creating and publishing a digital copy of the magazine since its first publication. This Archive constitutes part of another major project: the Memory of Modern Egypt. The repository was designed by ISIS to include collections of specialized libraries belonging to eminent Egyptian politicians, authors and historians, as well as content from all over the world related to the modern history of Egypt, encompassing the past 200 years.

The volumes of the entire 115 years of Al-Hilal were completely scanned, processed, and indexed. An application was implemented for browsing through the digital copies. There is an index for each issue listing the articles it contains. There is also a search facility by which you can find articles of your interest. Available also is a zoom in tool to help you see a clearer view and navigation buttons to ease moving between pages. The application was recently updated to include a single interface for the entire archive. The hierarchy for titles and subtitles helps users select the desired issues.

How can I access Al Hilal Digital Archive?
The issues of each decade have been compiled on a CD and provided with necessary browsing and searching tools. The CD collection is available at the BA Bookshop.

International participation
Bibliotheca Alexandrina participated with this project in the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) conference that took place in Tunis from 16 to 18 November 2005.

Have a look at the video on YouTube!