Library Of Alexandria Research Articles

The Historical Roots of the Emergence and Development of Higher Education in Egypt

This study examines the historical roots of higher education in Egypt, highlighting its evolution from ancient times to the modern era. The origins can be traced to the rich intellectual traditions of ancient Egypt and the renowned Library of Alexandria, which served as a center for scholarship. The establishment of Al-Azhar University in the 10th century marked a significant milestone, positioning Egypt as a key hub for Islamic education and scholarship. The 19th and 20th centuries introduced Western educational models, leading to the creation of modern universities, such as Cairo University in 1908, which emphasized secular and diverse curricula. This evolution reflects broader socio-political transformations, including colonialism and national identity movements. Today, Egypt's higher education system continues to navigate the interplay between its historical legacy and contemporary challenges, striving for innovation and global integration.

David Yellin, Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali and the Great Library of Damascus during the First World War

David Yellin, Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali and the Great Library of Damascus during the First World War

Biblioclasm :A Sociocultural Study of Knowledge Destruction and Prevention Through Legal Mechanisms

‘Biblioclasm: A Sociocultural Study of Knowledge Destruction and Prevention Through Legal Mechanisms’ explores the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of biblioclasm, the deliberate destruction of books and knowledge repositories, from a sociocultural perspective. This paper explores the causes of biblioclasm, its historical and modern expressions, and the function of legislative safeguards in preserving intellectual variety and cultural heritage. The study explores the sociocultural roots of biblioclasm and considers the different ideological, political, religious, or cultural motivations that people or groups may have for wanting to eliminate information. The study offers insights into the destructive forces that have affected human history by using historical examples like the burning of the Library of Alexandria and contemporary examples like the destruction of cultural artifacts by terrorist organisations. This study also emphasises the value of legislative safeguards in preventing biblioclasm and safeguarding the world's cultural heritage. It examines the efficiency of international treaties and conventions, such as the UNESCO Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, in averting the loss of knowledge and fostering cultural preservation. The study also looks at how domestic legal systems in particular areas or countries deal with biblioclasm. Keywords - Book Burning, Biblioclam, Iconoclasm, Destruction of Knowledge, Information Censorship, Destruction of Information

Integrating Digital Techniques/ Technologies in Developing Egyptian Museums (Case Study: Alexandria Library Museums - Alexandria City)

Integrating Digital Techniques/ Technologies in Developing Egyptian Museums (Case Study: Alexandria Library Museums - Alexandria City)

Deep Learning-Based Analysis of Ancient Greek Literary Texts in English Version: A Statistical Model Based on Word Frequency and Noise Probability for the Classification of Texts

In our paper we intend to present a methodology that we elaborated for clustering texts based on the word fre quency in the English translations of selected old Greek texts. We used the classification system of the ancient Library of Alex andria, devised by the prominent Greek scholar-poet, Callima chus in the 3rd century BC., as a basis for categorizing literary masterpieces. In our content analysis, we could determine a tri plet of a, b, c values for describing a power function that appro priately fits a curve determined by the word frequencies in the texts. In addition, we have discovered 16 special features of the different texts that correspond to various token categories inves tigated in each text, such as part of speech of the word in the con text, numerals, subordinate conjunction, symbols, etc. We have developed a cognitive model in which several hundred different subtexts were utilized for supervised learning with the aim of subtext class recognition. Concerning 200 subtexts, the triplet of a, b, c values, the classes of the subtexts, and their 16-dimen sional feature vectors were learnt for the Recurrent Neural Net work (RNN). It turned out that the Long-Short Term Memory RNN could efficiently predict which class a chosen subtext could be categorized into without considering the interpretation of the content. The influence of the non-zero error rate of new com munication services on the meaning of the transferred texts was also investigated. The impact of the noise on the classification accuracy was found to be linear, dependent on the character error rate.

The Fall of Z-Library: The “Burning of the Library of Alexandria” or Protection for Authors Against AI Companies

The Fall of Z-Library: The “Burning of the Library of Alexandria” or Protection for Authors Against AI Companies

Kardynał Bessarion i jego księgozbiór

Cardinal Bessarion (ca. 1400–1472), a theologian born in Trebizond and educated in Byzantium, made a career in the hierarchy of the Byzantine clergy and attracted the attention of the imperial family. He was one of the most active participants of the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438–1439). Following the failure of the church union in Constantinople, Bessarion came to work for the papal curia in Rome. As a cardinal he used his income and contacts to help Byzantine refugees and Greeks living under the rule of the Republic of Venice, especially after the fall of Constantinople. Fearing that the loss of statehood could mean that the heritage of Greek culture would fall into oblivion, Bessarion created a great library containing the masterpieces of Ancient Greek literature, the classical philosophical works, and the texts of the Eastern Church Fathers. In 1468, he donated this collection to the Republic of Venice, and in such a manner founded one of the first public libraries in Europe.

Preservation Strategies for Biodiversity Data

Preservation Strategies for Biodiversity Data

Public in Name Only: The 1939 Alexandria Library Sit-In Demonstration by Brenda Mitchell-Powell (review)

Public in Name Only: The 1939 Alexandria Library Sit-In Demonstration by Brenda Mitchell-Powell (review)

Auf den Spuren des hellenistischen Judentums in Caesarea: Ein Jüdischer Psalmenforscher in Origenes’ Glosse im Kontext Rabbinischer Literatur

Abstract This article offers a close reading of a gloss in Codex Ambrosianus B 106 of Origenes’ Hexapla on Psalms, which has in the past only been analyzed for its reference to the Patriarch. This article focuses on the Jewish scholar described in the gloss and analyzes his method of identifying Moses as the author of ten anonymous Psalms in view of Alexandrian scholarship. As Origen could only have communicated with his Jewish contemporary in Greek, the gloss provides unique insights into Hellenistic Judaism in 3d century Caesarea, which turns out to be well connected to Alexandrian methods of scholarship, available in late Antiquity in numerous intellectual centers of the Eastern Mediterranean, including Caesarea and Gadara. Moreover, the article points to conduits of communication between the Jewish Hellenistic scholar and rabbinic literature, where his conclusions resurface.

Upgraded and Grounded: Alexandria Library’s Experience in the ALA Pilot Program, Resilient Communities

This case study shares the experience of Alexandria Library during its participation in the American Library Association’s pilot program Resilient Communities: Libraries Respond to Climate Change. An explanation is given for why Alexandria Library participated and how programming was developed. Brief descriptions are included for the planned events. Outcomes and shortcomings of the series are discussed, as well as how the Library plans to proceed in the future. Resources are included to help interested readers learn more about how climate change and sustainability can be explored for library systems, along with a few questions to consider when beginning.

Upgraded and Grounded: Alexandria Library’s Experience in the ALA Pilot Program, Resilient Communities

Upgraded and Grounded: Alexandria Library’s Experience in the ALA Pilot Program, Resilient Communities

The Great Library of Japanese Poetry Translated by Alexander Dolin

The Great Library of Japanese Poetry Translated by Alexander Dolin

:Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book

:<i>Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book</i>

Hernando Colón’s New World of Books: Toward a Cartography of Knowledge

Hernando Colón’s New World of Books: Toward a Cartography of Knowledge

Integrated innovative solar lighting system for optimization of daylight utilization for public library in Alexandria, Egypt

Lighting has evolved over recent decades from an engineering perspective, in which ensuring safety and performance both indoors and outdoors has become a key discipline, engaged in a wide range of areas and having a profound impact on our daily lives. In this paper, a case study of a modern public library building will be addressed, with the main purpose of discussing energy efficiency related to light. Three parallel routes will be demonstrated to improve energy efficiency. The first is the integration of solar systems (PV) and the replacement of artificial lighting systems. The second is a change of building materials, internally and externally, to nanomaterials, and the third is through including an innovative anidolic lighting system, designed and applied in order to enhance the amount of daylight inside the library in a controlled manner. The inclusion of a vertical lighting system allows the optimization of solar energy resources, preserving the library’s style in a simple way. The system includes a collector light system, compounded by a truncated and double compound parabolic collector (PCPC) to capture natural light from outside over a wide angular range (180°) without a tracking system, preserving the building design and saving on costs and maintenance. These parallel routes, based on solar energy and lighting, can make a positive impact with minimum changes in the Alexandria library, providing environmental improvement and protecting buildings and human health in order to achieve a more sustainable example of architecture.

Bibliographical Control

Section 1 of this article discusses the concept of bibliographical control and makes a distinction between this term, “bibliographical description,” and related terms, which are often confused in the literature. It further discusses the function of bibliographical control and criticizes Patrick Wilson’s distinction between “exploitative control” and “descriptive control.” Section 2 presents projects for establishing bibliographic control from the Library of Alexandria to the Internet and Google, and it is found that these projects have often been dominated by a positivist dream to make all information in the world available to everybody. Section 3 discusses the theoretical problems of providing comprehensive coverage and retrieving documents represented in databases and argues that 100% coverage and retrievability is an unobtainable ideal. It is shown that bibliographical control has been taken very seriously in the field of medicine, where knowledge of the most important findings is of utmost importance. In principle, it is equally important in all other domains. The conclusion states that the alternative to a positivist dream of complete bibliographic control is a pragmatic philosophy aiming at optimizing bibliographic control supporting specific activities, perspectives, and interests.

Enhancing Hungarian students’ English language skills on the basis of literary texts in the three-dimensional space

In our paper we introduce a bilingual language learning material developed in the framework of the so-called three dimensional virtual library model (3DVLM). This model inspired by the history and organization of the famous ancient Library of Alexandria forms the basis of the virtual library project which started about eight years ago as part of the Cognitive Infocommunications (CogInfoCom) research. The current version of the 3DVLM uses the excellent 3D features of the MaxWhere Seminar System which makes it suitable for both individual learning and classroom use. In the following, we would like to introduce first the basic framework of our development, then describe in detail the data structure and organization of the developed bilingual language learning material. The basic idea of the material is to present selected phrases and contexts from classical literary works in English and from their parallel translations in Hungarian in order to improve both the language skills and background knowledge of Hungarian language learners at an advanced level. We found that using web technology was especially useful for developing the language learning material and the developed hypertext structure formed a scale-free network of interconnected nodes.

A Philosophical Approach to Aspects of Memory and Consciousness

Science in the modern age advances by the scientific method, which involves the experimental testing of hypotheses, continually revising them to better fit experimental observations. Nearly all articles in scientific journals report results of experiments that test hypotheses, that were in turn tested by earlier experiments. That means that the experiments that come next are based on those that have gone before. A flaw is that it does not provide a route to provide hypotheses that are completely new, and not inspired by previous hypotheses and experimental results. Centuries and millennia ago the primary means of discovery was Philosophy, which was based on the premise that the path to knowledge is to start from fundamental axioms and through a logical process of pure reason, arrive at explanations of everything. I thought it possible that by invoking a philosophical approach one might discover sui generis concepts that would be a source of novel hypotheses that were not inspired by previous hypotheses. Inspired by Rene’ Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am,’ I chose instead ‘That which cannot be observed does not exist.’ Following a logical path from there was easy, and I was surprised how many novel concepts emerged. Unlike most philosophical ideas, some of these concepts were subject to experimental tests. One was that a thought exerts a physical force, and a collection of our thoughts could provide a measurable force. This led to the design of a pendulum that was able to detect and analyze the substantial forces that surround a subject. These experiments would not have been done without the idea that thoughts exert a physical force. Another novel concept is that translocation of objects is a complex process that resembles a chemical reaction. This was used to derive an equation that embodies the laws of motion and defines terms for inertia and momentum. The concept was expanded by an argument that it could be possible for objects to accelerate and slow down without having to overcome inertia and momentum. Other concepts were related to memory and consciousness and suggested completely new ways by which the brain forms and recalls memories. There are many studies of the brain, and these are designed to test current hypotheses. Instead of performing new experiments, one could take those experimental results and see which hypothesis better explains them. Examples are provided that the show the philosophical hypothesis is the better one. Many concepts were discovered that are not described here. It is likely that many are incorrect, but perhaps some are not. Those that are correct could provide previously unavailable hypotheses that could drive discovery new directions. If this approach bears fruit, it may be useful to merge classical philosophical approaches with modern scientific methods. It may be a way to recover some of what was lost when the Library of Alexandria was burned.

Римские публичные библиотеки периода правления Октавиана Августа

The appearance in Rome the first public libraries in the reign of Octavian Augustus was a significant event in the cultural life of the imperial capital. By the beginning of our era, four libraries functioned in the city, the book riches of which were available to the entire free population of Rome and numerous guests of the city. Like the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, they retained a connection with cult buildings such as the sanctuaries of Apollo or the Atrium of Liberty. Libraries became public property either by transferring private collections of books (Lucullus libraries) to the state or were originally built at the expense of the treasury, but with wide involvement of donations from wealthy Romans, including family members of the ruling dynasty. The libraries of Rome were, at the same time, repositories of artefacts, that is, they served as New European museums, schools of poetics and rhetoric, and centers of communication of the intellectual elite. In them, under Octavian Augustus, honed literary skills and recited their works Horace, Ovid, Virgil. The material for this article served the reports of ancient authors and the results of archaeological excavations on the Palatine of recent decades. Epigraphic monuments (tombstones epitaphs of servants of Roman libraries of the first century CE, were attracted on the Appian Road) and authors who were not translated into Russian (Seneca the Elder, Fronton, Servius Grammaticus, Galen), or available only in old pre-revolutionary translations (Quintilian) were engaged as well. The influence on the formation of Roman libraries of the famous library in Alexandria of Egypt has been traced.