The Third Meeting of “The Memory of the Arab World” Project
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Alexandria—
The Executive Committee of “The Memory of the Arab World” Project will hold its third meeting in Cairo for 3 days starting from Tuesday, 20 January 2009. The meeting will take place in the BA Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CULTNAT) in the Smart Village with 22 Arab countries participating, in addition to international organizations.
The meeting will discuss what has been achieved since Sharjah Declaration, the official document of the project that resulted from the first meeting held in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates in October 2007. This meeting will also go through the recommendations of the Second Meeting that took place in Syria last May.
Participants will also tackle the procedures of establishing a portal on the Internet in Arabic and English. They will also discuss collecting the museums’ possessions, biographies of Arab scientists, the most important Arab cities, folk traditions and heritage as well as photographs so that the portal will act as a link between libraries and museums. Participants in the meeting will also determine the plan of the next phase for publishing material on the Memory of the Arab World portal, which was one of the recommendations of the Arab Ministries of Communication and Information Technology (ICT) Meeting that took place in Doha, in 2006. The portal was also declared as one of the Arab Strategic ICT projects to be implemented by the BA CULTNAT.
The project stresses the importance of regaining the status of the Arab cultural content that is deeply rooted in our heritage and civilization to overcome the “historic failure”. The Arab e-content constitutes no more than 0.5% of the world content; Arab and Islamic registered e-content is only 16.5% of the world heritage list, which doesn’t go in line with the great contributions provided by Arab culture and civilization throughout history.
“The Memory of the Arab World” Project is a regional Arab project to document Arab heritage and publish it online. It aims at preserving Arab heritage and introducing it to the younger generations, as well as building on what has already been achieved in that regard by different Arab and regional initiatives. Each Arab country would collect and document its tangible and intangible cultural heritage to be eventually published on the “The Memory of the Arab World” e-portal in Arabic and English. The portal will be divided into 3 sections: the map of the Arab world, the database, and the common timelines that connects different historic ages of the Arab countries.