The BA Receives GitHub Digital Archive
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Believing in the importance of the digital preservation of heritage for future generations and in the necessity of giving access to knowledge for all humanity, the Bibliotheca Alexandria received a copy of the GitHub digital archive, becoming the third library around the world, after the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the Stanford Libraries in California to obtain a copy of this platform. The BA will display this copy in its Digital World Exhibition.
GitHub, affiliated to Microsoft, is a digital repository for open source software, which can be shared and followed among programmers around the world. It currently includes nearly 40 million users.
GitHub collected 17,000 repositories of the most important open source software, in addition to a random sample of about 5000 other repositories, which were archived in reels of film and enclosed in a museum-quality box featuring 3D-printed and AI-generated artwork.
This initiative followed GitHub success in collecting millions of digital repositories and preserving them for a thousand years in the Arctic Code Vault in the North Pole, with an aim of protecting the software history from natural disasters, while giving a perception of today’s programmers to the coming generations.
It is worth mentioning that the BA has always been keen on preserving all forms of cultural heritage for humanity. It has launched several free online digital archives, digitized thousands of books, and participated in several international conferences through its work of archiving the internet.
For more information about GitHub, please visit:
https://archiveprogram.github.com