The Biblioteca Alexandrina opened for a trial six-week run October 1 in Egypt’s port city of Alexandria to test its computer systems and allow the public a glimpse of its reading rooms, audiovisual equipment, and other features. Construction work on the $230-million joint Egyptian/UNESCO facility was begun in June 1988 at a location near where the ancient library of Alexandria, founded in the 4th century B.C. during the reign of Pharaoh Ptolemy I Soter, once stood.
Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak delivered the inaugural speech, saying the library should be a “window for Egypt to the world and a window for the world to Egypt.” The trial opening coincided with the Reading for All Festival, a national celebration begun under the first lady’s auspices in 1991 and set during the week when the country’s 17 million children return to school.
Library Director Ismail Serageldin said the 31,000-square-foot building needed at least four more months of construction work and lacked a sufficient number of computers and Internet stations, the New York Times reported October 2. The official opening is now scheduled for April 23, United Nations International Book Day.
Although the library can accommodate at least four million volumes, it has accumulated only some 200,000 books so far, according to an October 2 Associated Press report. Alexandria University History Professor Mostafa El-Abbadi, who in 1974 was one of the first to propose the project, said the library must embark on a robust acquisitions campaign. An international library is “not viable unless it holds a minimum of one million titles, and that is a modest number,” he said.
Posted October 8, 2001.