The Botroseyya Digital Archive

The Botros Ghaly family
This extraordinary Egyptian family held high and critical positions in the Egyptian government throughout the past 200 years, and thus contributed to formulating a great deal of Egyptian history. Botros Ghaly Pasha was Prime Minister of Egypt from 1908 to 1910. Wasef Botros Ghaly was also Prime Minister for 4 terms between 1924 and 1937. Botros Ghaly Pasha's grandson, who was named after him, Botros Botros Ghaly, served as Egyptian Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 1977 until early 1991. Moreover, he held the position of the Deputy Prime Minister of Egypt for several months before moving to the UN as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, and then Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1992. Currently, Youssef Botros has been the Egyptian Minister of Finance since 2004. Before that he held the posts of Minister for International Cooperation followed by Minister of Economy.

The digital archive
In the context of preserving the modern history of Egypt, this project aims at digitizing the documents pertaining to the Botros Ghaly family. The family descendants have saved a large number of documents (reports, letters, telegrams, articles, Egyptian and foreign newspaper clips, invitations, photos, etc.) related to the family’s political role since the late 1800’s. The collection includes over 5,500 documents. The project attempts to digitize the entire multilingual (Arabic, Ethiopian, English, French, German, Italian, Osmanli, Latin, Persian, and Turkish) collection and provide it in web-based searchable form for historians, politicians and researchers.

BA finalized an agreement with the Botros Ghaly family to digitize the collection. A team was formed and trained for the indexing and digitizing of the documents. A workflow was implemented and is being used for the digitization of the documents, associating metadata with each document, and incorporating the output into the Digital Assets Repository (DAR). Moreover, equipment was installed (two units) at the Botroseyya mansion in Cairo along with the software developed for the project. Up to date, more than 13,500 pages and 670 photos were digitized. A special collection related to Botros Botros Ghaly were also digitized.