Amsterdam, 24 February 2005 - Elsevier announced the signing of a three year agreement with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) in Egypt for the provision of scientific, technical and medical (STM) information that includes full access to all Elsevier electronic journals, over six million articles via ScienceDirect, and eight backfiles packages, including The Lancet.

The information provided through this agreement will be made available to the over 12,000 annual users of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and any visitor to the library is permitted free access to the information under the standard Elsevier “walk-in” provision. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a highly profiled and visited place. Nearly a million visitors and tourists visited the library last year. By signing this agreement, Bibliotheca Alexandrina is increasing its electronic collection by 1,800 titles of which the majority are high-impact, peer-reviewed journals, thus providing instant access to authoritative sources of scientific information in support of quality research

“I am delighted that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina will be able to offer its users access to ScienceDirect. ScienceDirect is a very compelling product of scientific and scholarly journals and is considered one of the foremost databases in the field. We are excited that we can now meet the demand we've been hearing about from so many of our scientific community users. I feel strongly that this database will greatly benefit them,” said Dr. Sohair Wastawy, Chief Librarian of the Library of Alexandria.

“Being able to provide such access to so many of our users is a result of a strong partnership between Elsevier and the BA,” Wastawy added.

For ScienceDirect, this agreement constitutes a breakthrough into the Egyptian market, as this is the first time for a library in Egypt to have full access to the entire content of ScienceDirect.

The ancient Bibliotheca Alexandrina has always been at the forefront of scholarship since it was first founded early in the 3rd century B.C. by Demetrius of Phalerum, an Aristotelian philosopher. The library had one of the largest collections of books in the ancient world – about 700,000 papyrus manuscripts fully catalogued. Due to the vast collections available in the library, many scholars travelled to Alexandria and became permanent residents.

The library stood for 300 years until a fire partly destroyed its main premises in 48 B.C. A branch of the library, the “Daughter Library”, survived until the end of the 4th century A.D., when the Serapeum of Alexandria was destroyed by an Imperial Decree in 391 A.D. and an earthquake finally destroyed it in the year 30 A.D.  In 1974, a committee from the University of Alexandria was formed to plan the rebuilding of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina as near as possible to the presumed location of the original structure. The entire project took nearly 30 years to complete, as the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina was finally opened to the public in October 2002.

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