Digitizing materials from President Anwar El-Sadat

We all know that the president of Egypt is Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak has been president since 1981. But who was president before him and what did that person accomplish? That was President Anwar El-Sadat who took great measures to create peace between Egypt and Israel. One of the collections being digitized by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is that related to Sadat. According to the web site:

An agreement has already been finalized with President SadatÂ’s family to digitize the collection and negotiations are currently taking place with newspaper agencies, museums and others to receive their collections. A team is being formed for the indexing of the pictures collection and another team to sort and evaluate documents and other information resources available. A workflow has been designed and is being tested for digitization of the pictures, documents, audio and video recordings and other information resources, associating metadata with each item, and incorporating the output into DAR [Digital Asset Repository].

And President Sadat's family is partnering with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and International School of Information Science (ISIS) on this project.

From the site, one can assume that this project is "in progress." With the 25th anniversary of Sadat's assassinationoccurringg this Oct. 6, I hope they will be able to release some of the digitized materials online. Wouldn't it be interesting -- and likely enlightening -- to read his notes from the peace negotiations he was involved in?

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is engaged in a number of projects. Some of the projects already have their own web sites, while others do not. What seems to be missing from those that are not yet online is a clear indication of "where they are" in the process and when something will be available. Those clues would help us, their potential users.

---

Technorati tag: Digitization