My Book

Digital & Printed

“My Book: Digital & Printed” is the fruit of collaboration amongst many parties including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Internet Archive, the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) and the Egyptian Ministry of Education. This project is designed to enable children to relate to both printed and digital information in a seamless fashion, and to bring the marvels of the digital age to the poorest part of the community. The proposed project aims to:

• Teach children that written words can be transformed from digital format to printed format and then to bound book and vice versa. This process will eliminate the concept of duality that some children have where they mix the material they see on computer screens and printed material in books.
• Attract children to books through allowing them to print, bind, make books, and then keep them as their own.
• Use digital technology to make the works of man permanently accessible to billions of people all over the world through the Million Book Project and the Internet Archive.

This project will change the student’s concept of traditional means of acquiring knowledge. It can be a turning point in the educational system in Egypt.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina has started already with this project among children who visit the Library on regular basis, school children in Alexandria as well as children who did not get the opportunity to visit the Library. A stationary unit has been established in the main library building to serve children visiting the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has augmented the contents of a number of children books on computer screens in an endeavor to make these works available for children to select the required material to view, print, bind and put them together in a final book format. Such experience will encourage children to upgrade their skills and acquaint them with using computers as a source of information.

Transforming knowledge from its digital format to a printed form proves that there is no competition between printed sources of knowledge and the Internet. One can choose whatever book one wants from the BA website: http://archive.bibalex.org/mybook.

One can then print it using any printer, cut it into two halves and bind it, thus allowing children to choose and create their own books, and thereby helping them value and appreciate different sources of information.

1-Scanning 2-Selecting 3-Printing 4-Cutting 5-Binding 6-Reading The Bookmaking Process

Book Mobile

The equipment of the project is not only available for the children and young people visiting BA, but there is also a fully equipped van that is touring Alexandria primary and preparatory schools. The vehicle for the project was donated by the Rachid Mashreq Group, a multinational company. The equipment was donated by the Internet Archive in San Francisco.

The Book Mobile van at one of the schools

This is the fourth book mobile in the world. The first was in California, the second and the third were in India, and the fifth will be in Uganda soon.

It will be accompanied by a number of social and pedagogical studies that aim at fostering the relationship between children, information resources, and their fields of interest. The studies aim at getting the proper feedback, the extent of benefit and children’s evaluation of the books they read in regards to their contents and layout, then link all these topics to their social and economic backgrounds. The results will provide proper feedback for improving the impact of this project on an on-going basis as well as developing protocols that can be used to compare between children who visit the Library of Alexandria regularly, schoolchildren of Alexandria and children in poor districts, who have no access to viewing books or using computers.

The digital book collection on the BA website is fast growing with a start-up collection of 200 children and young people’s books. Parallel to the children’s digital book collection, BA is now engaged in another related venture called the Million Book Project. The Library of Alexandria will share and exchange digitized book collections with the United States and India as an ongoing process. This will provide a very rich collection of electronic resources on the Internet for everyone.

Officials, teachers and students are all excited about this endeavor. The Book Mobile van will continue its visits according to a schedule prepared by the Ministry of Education. The main target is to visit each school more than once, and encourage students to come to BA and get acquainted with the new world of knowledge.