Suez Canal Digital Archive
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Alexandria—
The BA International School of Information Science (ISIS) launched the Suez Canal Digital Archive, an essential addition to the digital archive’s. The Canal’s rich history has been documented since before its inauguration until today in many forms, including reports, books, photographs and videos, and this material is now available online in an archive that provides the user with access to the extensive amount of information with the necessary navigation and search tools. The extensive collection is available via the online digital archive in three interfaces: Arabic, French and English.
The material on the website so far constitutes the result of the first phase of the project, which was concerned with a rare collection of digitized material donated to the BA by the Association of the Friends of Ferdinand de Lesseps, and complimented by material from the BA’s own collection. The next phase of the project will include material from the Suez Canal Authority that will greatly enrich the website’s content.
In its current phase, the archive consists of the following:
• About 21,000 pages of documents related to transit services, including port papers, registers, receipts, statistics and reports of ships’ transitions;
• About 3,500 pages from reports of the Consultative Commission of Work, covering the pre-inauguration plans, decision making, etc;
• 2,500 reports of the General Secretariat. All of these reports were able to undergo the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process due to the fact that they were typewritten;
• Nearly 9,500 copies of letters generally dealing with correspondences from the office in Suez to various French destinations;
• More than 2,300 Bulletin Boards that were issued every ten days;
• More than 300 photos in seven different albums, taken by renowned photographers Hippolyte Arnoux and the Zangaki brothers;
• 13 documentary films covering the founding of the city of Port Fouad and workshops around the Canal;
• Over 100 maps, detailing plans of the Canal and the surrounding cities.
The search facilities in the website represent the latest in the digital trends. Each of the categories of digital material has a simple search engine that caters to these categories’ specifications; for example, while viewing the letters category, one can search through them by date, sender and receiver.
The advanced search provides the user with various search methods. A key feature to the advanced search is the timeline; since the material in the website is generally categorized by type of material, a method of uniting the vast amount of data available was by date.
While designing the website’s navigation capabilities, special care was given to enhancing the experience for users with low speed connections. This is particularly evident in the case of the maps, which utilize an image service to load images in segments, allowing the user to zoom in on the details of the map even at low speed connection without sacrificing any of the quality of the image. In the case of the videos, different streaming capabilities are available for different internet speeds.
The Memory of Suez Canal archive material covers more than 100 years of the history of this manmade achievement, and as such, it will help to preserve the memory of a significant aspect of Egyptian history for future generations.
Click here for the website.