15 June 2008
Launching the Suez Canal Digital Archive
With just over a month left for the 52nd anniversary of the nationalization of the Suez Canal, ISIS has launched the first phase the Suez Canal digital archive project, http://suezcanal.bibalex.org, which documents the history of the Canal since its inauguration.
This project aims to bring together material pertaining to the Canal’s history, such as manuscripts, lithographs, paintings, images, as well as audio and visual materials, allowing the digital documents to be available to the public through an Internet digital archive. The material of the first phase of the project comes from two different sources: Part of the material has been donated to the Library by the Association of the Friends of Ferdinand de Lesseps, while the rest of the material has come from the Library’s own collection. The archive is trilingual, covering Arabic, French and English. Material on the website has been subjected to OCRing when the case of the original material allowed for so, and this has aided in the search facilities of the site; advanced search tools are also present, allowing for search criteria’s to be determined and limited by choosing to search by keywords, titles of documents, dates, location...etc. The search results can also be filtered through the usage of the timeline available.