The BA at the Cultural Heritage Archives Symposium at the Library of Congress
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The BA participated in the “Cultural Heritage Archives: Networks, Innovation and Collaboration” Symposium, held on September 26-27, 2013, at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
The BA Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Sector participated with a paper demonstrating its digitization efforts in the “Memory of Modern Egypt” digital archive, a single online library encompassing thousands of various cultural and historical materials covering almost 200 years of the modern history of Egypt, and Dar Al-Mahfouzat digitization initiative which targets documenting selective content from the National Archives of Egypt, one of the richest archives in the world due to the huge number of documents it contains dating back to the 6th century Hijri/12th century A.D.
The Symposium brought together leading institutions in the field of digital preservation of cultural heritage such as the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress; University of Oregon Libraries; Bibliotheca Alexandrina; Pitt Rivers Museum University of Oxford; Université Paris Diderot, University of Alberta; Smithsonian Institution; Center for American Political Studies, Harvard University; and Washington State University among others, providing a platform for discussing different initiatives and best practices in digital preservation in terms of public access and outreaching the digitized material. It also explored ongoing collaborations between archives, and ways to foster the development of coordinated training for the archival treatment of cultural heritage materials.