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