2017 BoT Annual Meeting
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The BA Board of Trustees (BoT) annual meeting started today, and it is set to be held over the course of two days to discuss the latest projects and programs executed by the BA. The meeting’s forefront topic is the combatting extremism and terrorism program and the BA’s continuous efforts in developing and advocating for said program. A number of summits revolving around the issue were organized and held in several Arab countries with partner organizations from Jordan, UAE, Morocco, and Kuwait. Additionally, a conference was held at the University of Birmingham in the UK followed by the 3rd annual combatting extremism conference, The World Is Rising Up: United Against Extremism, in January 2017. The BA has also collaborated with al-Azhar and Dar Al-Iftaa in organizing various courses and workshops on Islamic culture that helped Egyptian youth better understand Islam and reaffirm their true identity.
The meeting will address various projects, including the “Science City” Project and competition through which the winner was chosen by a committee of national and international experts. The interactive educational program “edx” will also be tackled, as a team from the BA traveled in September 2016 to receive training at the internationally renowned Harvard and MIT universities in the USA. The BA lunched two courses on edx in 2016, and they both received significant Egyptian and Arab interaction.
The Library has begun a major project, in collaboration with several Arab organizations, to document and archive the Memory of the Arab World. The project includes pictures, films, documents, music, currencies, mail stamps, and more, which will render it a valuable reference for Arabs once it is launched online.
The BA has also started an ambitious plan to increase its capacity to provide more significant services to people around the world in Arabic, English, and French, as several digital projects—such as the Memory of Modern Egypt, digitizing academic research papers, and the digital periodicals project—have been optimized causing a qualitative leap in the BA’s performance and services.
To better serve its visitors and enable them to fully benefit from its facilities, the BA developed its Tour Guides services—which offer guided tours in various languages— and the services offered by its Library Sector. This development primarily targets students of all ages, for the Library serves as an essential resource of information and research materials.
As for the Library’s Academic Sector centers, they have published over 65 books, and they continue to offer their training and educational programs and initiatives.
The BA Embassies of Knowledge were also further developed and expanded reaching more governorates and a larger number of students and academics. The BA plans to establish more embassies of knowledge this year and expand their services to reach centers affiliated with the Academy Of Scientific Research and Technology.
Additionally, the BA developed a detailed program to build African networks that aim to provide advanced academic communication among people all over Africa in the fields of agriculture, the environment, and information technology. The interaction of the BA centers with African universities and intellectuals complements the aims and success of said networks.
The aforementioned achievements were accomplished alongside the various and exceptional activities held by the BA, as it still organizes an average of 1,400 cultural event and its official websites receives over a billion hits each year. The BA has also improved in reaching its audience in Egypt and abroad, as it now receives about a million visitors. This major development in reaching a wider audience has resulted in more diverse activities at the BA, including concerts, exhibitions, and workshops, rendering it a prominent entity among Arab and international cultural organizations.
The BA has made great progress and achievements in information technology initiatives, most important of which is its transformation into a paperless organization in order to increase and improve work efficiency and speed. During the past period, most dealings of the Finance and Administration Sector and the Engineering Sector and their internal print correspondences have been digitized. Legal transactions and documents are currently undergoing the digitization process, which has had great positive impact on work performance and efficiency at the Library.
The BA has also applied to obtain a second patent for its “Info Wall” and has renovated its Supercomputer in order for it to keep up with the latest technologies, enabling the BA to have more connections in the field of scientific research at the most renowned academic institutions around the world.