Partnerships

Joining the Digital Library Federation (DLF)

The Digital Library Federation (DLF), founded in 1995, is a partnership organization of academic libraries and related organizations that are pioneering the use of electronic information technologies to extend their collections and services. Through its strategic partners, the DLF provides leadership for libraries by identifying standards and "best practices" for digital collections and network access; coordinating research and development in the libraries' use of technology; and incubating projects and services that libraries need but cannot develop individually. The DLF operates under the administration umbrella of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). 

With 35 partners and 5 allies, the DLF identifies, documents, endorses, and promotes adoption of standards and best practices that support the effective acquisition, interchange, persistence, and assessment of digital library collections and services. 

On the 20 th May, 2005, BA joined DLF as the first Strategic Partner from outside the USA and Europe, the first from the Middle East, and the second outside the USA (after the British Library). This will allow the BA to participate in the world-wide effort of developing and promoting strategies and standards for creating and maintaining sustainable and scalable digital collections. 

Partners & Participants:

The current 35 DLF partners include the British Library, California Digital Library, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Council on Libraries and Information Resources, Dartmouth College, Emory University, Harvard University, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, Library of Congress, National Archives & Records Administration, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York Public Library, New York University, North Carolina State University, Pennsylvania State University, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, University of California – Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, University of Tennessee, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, University of Washington, Yale University, Oxford University and Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Agreement between the BA and the Library of Congress (LoC)

On 11 May 2006, the Library of Congress and the BA(Bibliotheca Alexandrina) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) according to which Bibliotheca Alexandrina agreed to play a leading role in the planning of a World Digital Library and to contribute some of its own collections to the project. The two libraries will also embark on completing a joint digital library project that will serve as one of the building blocks of the future digital library, and that will be used to develop and test standards, technologies, and procedures.

Joining hands with Yale University to improve access to Middle Eastern heritage

Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Yale University Library, USA, have developed several partnerships since October 2002. In October 2002, the two libraries joined hands in creating the Online Access to Consolidated Information on Serials for the Middle East (OACIS) project. The project, generously funded by TICFIA (US Department of Education), aims to improve access to Middle Eastern serials in libraries in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East and to make scholarly literature from, and about, the Middle East widely and easily available to scholars around the world. The OACIS project may be accessed through http://oacis.bibalex.org.

In 2004, BA was invited by Yale University to be a partner in the Iraqi ReCollection project. The project aims to digitize a selected group of the most important scholarly humanistic Iraqi journals held by Yale and the University of Pennsylvania and permit the retrieval and display of this group via the Internet. Moreover, on 7 August 2005, the partnership developed further to create the OACIS’s sequel, the Arabic and Middle Eastern Electronic Library (AMEEL) project. The AMEEL project is the logical next phase following OACIS.

Partnership between the BA and the Internet Archive

Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Internet Archive developed a partnership in April 2002, according to which the Internet Archive in San Francisco, USA, donated to the BA a copy of the archive of the World Wide Web and 2000 hours of television programs on a set of 200 computers. Moreover, on 26 June 2003, the Internet Archive donated some equipments to the My Book: Digital and Printed project. For more information about the Internet Archive, click here, and http://archive.bibalex.org.

Agreement between the BA and the UNDL Foundation

In January 2001, Bibliotheca Alexandrina signed an agreement with the Universal Network Digital Language (UNDL) Foundation. According to this agreement, BA is to implement the Universal Networking Language Program for the development and promotion of multilingual communication, information processing and access to knowledge across language barriers with the use of the new information and communication technologies. The agreement was renewed in July 2004.