Egyptian Press Clips

Digitiseing one million Egyptian press clips written in Arabic, English, and French: This is the challenge the CEDEJ decided to take on in 2014 with the support of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Cut and categorized for 40 years (1970-2010), these articles represent an invaluable source of information. In order to highlight the press clips and make them accessible to all, we created a research tool: The press clips have been scanned, processed with the OCR technology, indexed with key words, and then categorized online at http://cedej.bibalex.org.

This platform currently hosts 500,000 press clips on various topics such as water, agriculture, women, culture, and others. The articles hail from 24 Egyptian and Arab daily and weekly newspapers, with 13 available in print and 11 electronically. The scans offer priceless insights into the evolution of contemporary Egyptian society.

This program owes its success to the collaboration between CEDEJ and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. The library managed the process of scanning the press clips while the CEDEJ catalogued and indexed the archives, allowing them to be published on the website.

Cooperation between these two teams will continue through the digitization of a portion of CEDEJ’s collection, consisting of 15,000 copyright-free books.

Project Manager: Hala Bayoumi

A documentary to celebrate cooperation between CEDEJ and Bibliotheca Alexandrina

To celebrate the digitization of 500,000 Egyptian press clips online at cedej.bibalex.org, CEDEJ produced a 20-minute documentary film tracing the creation of this research tool.

In both Cairo and Alexandria, CEDEJ and Bibliotheca Alexandrina teams were filmed engaging in different stages of the project: scanning, OCR processing, indexing, and categorizing the press clips online.

The film was shown at the French Institute of Egypt in April 2016 and later at the CNRS headquarters in Paris in May 2016. It will be broadcast at the Egyptian Cultural Center in Fall 2016 in Paris.