As AUC undertakes the challenge of building a new state-of-the-art campus to elevate scholarship in Egypt and build bridges between cultures, it is not alone. After decades of effort by local organizers, the Egyptian government and international supporters, the glittering Bibliotheca Alexandrina promises to be an invaluable ally in the mission of scholarly research and intercultural understanding. First Lady Suzanne Mubarak '77, '82, chair of the library's board of trustees, describes it as "Egypt's window on the world and the world's window on Egypt."

If it could be said that the ancient Library of Alexandria became a ghost after the building was destroyed by fire in 48 B.C., it now has a new body to occupy. The ultramodern structure of the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina is now a unique landmark on the Mediterranean coast. But before the spirit of that history-changing archive can imbue the new building, organizers are going to have to work hard to show that the new institution can change the world too.

In the three decades that moved it from implausible dream to granite reality, the resurrected Bibliotheca Alexandrina assumed many potential roles. The striking architecture instantly made it the pride of resurgent Alexandria, while its army of benefactors ensured that it had the potential to become a significant treasury of international printed materials. Supporters, however, hope that the library will become much more: a prestigious center of scholarly research, a front-runner in computerized information storage, a host to major international academic conferences, a goodwill ambassador for Egypt and a mediator in the clash of civilizations.

But even as organizers celebrate having overcome daunting financial and logistical hurdles, the commemorations mark challenges of identity for the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina. With such sprawling ambitions, what kind of library will it be? If the institution aspires to be authoritative in academic research, what will be its niche? More pragmatically, while the library aspires to hold four to eight million documents, its shelves currently hold about a quarter of a million books. How can a library in the expensive 21st century catch up with institutions that have been gathering materials for hundreds of years? Defining these missions and securing the means will be the challenge of the international scholars, who comprise the Bibliotheca's new board of trustees, and of its director, Dr. Ismail Serageldin, former vice president of the World Bank.

"When I met the director of the Library of Congress, Daniel Boorstin," says Moustafa El-Abbadi, a father of the revival project, "he said, 'Good heavens, you are dreamers. You want to construct a universal library at the end of the 20th century? We could not replicate the Library of Congress at the end of the 20th century.' I said, 'Yes, I know, but we have to move.'"

Spectacular Vessel
While the mission and function of the library have yet to solidify, the facility's physical shape is nothing short of triumphant. The most distinctive element of Alexandria's skyline looks like it could be the ceramic bowl of a giant, tipped to one side. The library's round perimeter wall is made of granite from Aswan and engraved with letters and symbols from every known system of writing. Around it are shallow reflecting pools. The building's roof is slanted in such a way that it becomes the fa�ade, making it seem as if the building is peering out at the sea. The library's architects, from the Norwegian firm Snohetta, say the slant is intended to echo the sun meeting the horizon, symbolizing the passage of time. The angle also maximizes natural light and, in a faint echo of a pyramid, makes each upper floor smaller than the one below it.
At the lowest level, the largest floor will hold manuscripts and rare books. The library already has more than 10,000 and has begun digitizing the manuscripts for electronic display and translation. Above are areas for multimedia, language and literature, and then music, art and architecture. The United Nations and European Union have made Alexandria one of the official depository libraries for their publications, which are housed on the fourth floor, along with labs for film and paper conservation. Sections for the blind and for children are on the fifth and sixth floors. The next two floors are reserved for the International School for Information Studies, not expected to be a degree-conferring institution but envisioned as a home for leading-edge research in the computerized storage of knowledge. The two narrowest floors at the peak are for administration.

The outer edge of the library is intersected by a long walkway that extends to the University of Alexandria in one direction and to the Corniche on the other. At the street side of the 45,000-square meter property, the promenade passes the library's planetarium and science museum, a smaller sphere with illuminated stripes that make it look like a cosmic croquet ball. A 3,200-capacity conference center completes the site.

Storied Site
The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina is located on the same site, give or take a kilometer, where the ancient library was built 2,300 years earlier. Alexander the Great conquered the known world and thought about amassing the world's knowledge in the city that he founded in his name. But the Great Library was born later, under Ptolemy I Soter, the Greek king of Egypt who asserted independence from the empire and made Alexandria the seat of his kingdom and a world center for scholarship.
Ptolemy ordered the library built in 295 B.C. and sent emissaries to collect scrolls under an aggressive program continued by his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus and grandson, Ptolemy III Euergetes. Soter gave his chief librarian, Demetrius, a generous budget and encouraged him to acquire all the books in the world. As recounted in Moustafa El-Abbadi's history of the library, when Soter asked how many books had been gathered, Demetrius replied: "More than two hundred thousand, O King; and I will soon make diligent search for the remainder, so that a total of half a million may be reached."

These were bibliophiles with guile. The Ptolemies reportedly searched ships unloading in the Alexandria harbor for scrolls, taking the ones deemed desirable and compensating the owners. El-Abbadi tells the story of how Ptolemy III persuaded Athens to lend him the manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides so that he could copy them, only to send back the copies and keep the originals in Alexandria. Such insistent methods eventually increased the library's collection to an estimated 500,000 scrolls.

Meanwhile, the library became the magnet for an elevated center of scholarship-the "Mouseion" or shrine to the Muses, where leading minds would come to study and teach elite groups of pupils. It was there that Archimedes invented his pump and Euclid wrote the foundations of geometry; there that other scholars determined the function of the heart, devised the leap year, and estimated the Earth's circumference. A newly published book, The Library of Alexandria: Center of Learning in the Ancient World (The AUC Press), contends that the library caused a convergence between cultures as it drew together scholars and statesmen from Greek, Roman, Jewish and Syrian societies.

But the rise of the Roman Empire led to the library's undoing. In 48 B.C., Julius Caesar, siding with Cleopatra in her war with her younger brother Ptolemy XIII, found himself boxed in at Alexandria. As a tactical maneuver, he set fire to the ships in the harbor. The Great Library, adjacent to the harbor, is believed to have been destroyed along with 40,000 scrolls, perhaps many more. Part of the collection remained unscathed at smaller libraries and the Mouseion, where teaching and scientific research continued after the Romans conquered Egypt in 30 B.C. But Roman suppression of rebellions in the 3rd century A.D. scared away the scholars, and it is believed that the Mouseion was destroyed in 391 A.D. by Roman decree.

Through time, as Roman dominion passed to Arabs, Ottomans, colonialism and independence, the Library of Alexandria was no more a candidate for resurrection than the lost city of Atlantis.

A School With No Library
Success has many fathers, and the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina has at least two. Dr. Lutfi Dowidar, an Alexandria native, traveled to Cairo University for his medical degree and stayed on as a lecturer in the medical school. In 1945, he came back to be part of Alexandria University, formed three years earlier. Amid wartime scarcity, the school's founders put a priority on the essentials-classroom buildings, instructors' offices and labs. Compared to Cairo, "it was clear to me what was missing in the university," says Dowidar, namely, a large library, not to mention a conference center.

Dr. Moustafa El-Abbadi grew up in Alexandria and attended its university, becoming a professor of ancient history there in 1960 after completing his studies at Cambridge University. In 1972, at a public lecture at the university's faculty club, El-Abbadi suggested that a new library for the university could be built as a revival of the ancient institution. Encouraged by Dowidar, the university's director at the time, El-Abbadi wrote a paper in 1974 elaborating on the proposal. The two served on committees to study the idea and found another key supporter in the late Fouad Helmy, a professor of civil engineering and onetime Alexandria governor.

The response in Alexandria and Cairo was unanimous: Great idea, but too expensive, especially in the aftermath of the 1973 war. "The idea was in our minds and on paper, but nothing moved," says Dowidar, who later became president of Alexandria University. For a while, the idea stalled.

As Egypt's financial situation improved, the government adopted the project as a priority, but money was still lacking. In 1984, organizers decided they needed help on a global scale. Alexandria organizers sent proposals and delegates to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which had shown its effectiveness in preserving Egyptian heritage with massive projects such as the relocation of the giant Ramses II temples at Abu Simbel.

In 1986, then UNESCO Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow of Senegal visited Alexandria, and organizers say that his visit was the crucial turning point. M'Bow was enthralled with the idea and agreed to put UNESCO's organizing powers and fundraising reach behind the project-under two conditions. First, because UNESCO makes agreements with governments, not universities, the library would be identified as one for the public and not the university community. Second, to emphasize that the project was intended as a revival of ancient Greek roots, the new project would go by the name Bibliotheca Alexandrina. "Then the whole world started to hear about it," Dowidar points out. "Without UNESCO, the project could never have seen the light."

In 1987, M'Bow issued an appeal for international assistance. In 1990, First Lady Suzanne Mubarak hosted leaders from 17 countries as they signed the Aswan Declaration pledging their support for the project and calling for donations. The declaration could scarcely have been more ambitious: "The Bibliotheca Alexandrina will stand as a testimony to a decisive moment in the history of human thought ... It will bear witness to an original undertaking that, in embracing the totality and diversity of human experience, became the matrix for a new spirit of critical inquiry, for a heightened perception of knowledge as a collaborative process."

Associations of Friends of the Alexandria Library formed around the world to gather funds and books. Arab countries donated $65 million, while 27 other countries contributed $32 million. In addition to donating the land and the recently constructed conference center, Egypt pledged $120 million over the life of the project. Construction began in 1995.

Many Missions
The library project rapidly took on Egypt's aspirations to be a leader not only in scholarship but also in solving contemporary problems and mending rifts between different segments of civilization.

"The Library of Alexandria not only focuses on ancient knowledge and future science, but also concentrates on the present, which abounds with inspiration and creativity," Mrs. Mubarak said in a speech at the library's soft opening just weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks. "The library will be Egypt's window on the world and the world's window on Egypt. It will be a meeting point for dialogue between ideas and cultures, an openness that we desperately need at this time, especially after the tragic events the world has recently witnessed."

The visions have been articulated by Mrs. Mubarak, who headed the international commission for the project and now chairs the library's board of trustees, and by Ismail Serageldin, the World Bank official who advised the Egyptian government on the project and was named its first director. Serageldin, who headed the international jury that selected a master planner for AUC's move from central Cairo to a planned community near Heliopolis, received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from AUC in June 2000 and was a distinguished visiting professor at AUC in 2000-01. Before President Hosni Mubarak named him director of the Alexandria Library, he was under consideration for the post of UNESCO director-general.

Serageldin has said that he wants the library to be a leader in technology and intellectual debate, even on the thorniest modern issues. "We have chosen as the focus the ethics of science of technology, an area of enormous importance with every single discovery, every day. There is no [library] you immediately think of where you go for that," he told AUCtoday.

The ambitions are broad, but Serageldin's experience and personal drive make them realistic. "He is a very dynamic person with an international dimension," says Richard Holmquist, UNESCO's liaison to the project. "By virtue of his dynamism and leadership, [his appointment] is a key element."

Establishing a new meeting place for the world will take time, but the library is beginning to fill in its calendar. A conference on biotechnology took place in March under the auspices of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and others. In September 2002, the International Labor Organization and the Organization of American States are expected to hold the Youth Employment Conference.

Finding A Research Niche
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is committed to the goal of increasing human knowledge, but still undefined is what field the library will establish itself in as an essential stop for researchers. "It must be specialized in something. Otherwise it will have no meaning," says former Alexandria University President Dowidar. Dowidar believes the Bibliotheca Alexandrina's research specialties should draw on the fields that spring naturally from its place in an historic and desert land: the early civilizations of the Middle East, the Mediterranean region and even elsewhere in Africa and the Far East; Islam and the roots of Christianity and Judaism; and agriculture, irrigation and related sciences.

But the past is not enough, says Dr. Laila Takla, a former member of Egypt's parliament and onetime AUC professor, who serves on the library's board of trustees. Takla agrees that the library should specialize in scholarship of ancient civilizations and religions. In fact, with rare book donations flowing in from Egypt's Coptic and Jewish leaders, the library may follow Mrs. Mubarak's suggestion of adding a "hall of religions." But Takla hopes the library will develop renown for following the ancient disciplines through their evolution to the present. "It's not only historical. We will never forget today and tomorrow," says Takla.

The trustees' policies in coming years will point the way. Serageldin favors specializing in technology and science, in particular behavioral sciences, because those studies fuel many current debates and currently lack a dominant research library, says the library's media consultant Khaled Azab.

Then there is the bedrock challenge of any new library: filling the shelves. While the Aswan Declaration proclaimed that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina would "attempt to constitute a summum of knowledge, to assemble the writings of all the peoples," organizers are not attempting to race to universal library status. Money is still an issue. While Egypt is expecting to cover the ongoing operations with help from donations and library fees, UNESCO officials, acknowledging that Egypt may need help with the day-to-day budget over the long term, have continued fundraising for operating expenses. Serageldin has said that he hopes the library's annual acquisition budget in the next few years will grow to more than $1 million, even $2 million, but in targeted areas. "Clearly, the competitive advantage is not going to be in the sheer number of volumes that are available," Serageldin says. "We have to have a very focused strategy in our collection. There are some things where we can become the very best in the world."

Far from the Ptolemaic approach of ordering aides far and wide on search-and-grab book expeditions, the current library's policy will be to start locally and spread: first gathering enough material to become authoritative on Alexandria, then on Egypt as a whole, and then on the Mediterranean region and Arab world, while taking care not to duplicate the work of already existing pan-Arab archives. As for subjects, Serageldin wants the book acquisitions to concentrate on a group of disciplines: science and technology, including ethical issues; humanities, including the ancient Greeks; arts and culture; and development issues including water use. "From out of that matrix, you begin to see, if we want the library to be a vibrant center of intellectual debate, then we can pick things that fit into that," Serageldin says. "And at the same time we use that template to have a collection strategy for our books and periodicals before jumping forward to the electronic age and bringing our history to life."

"How will we do it? What are the areas of our priority? These questions cannot be answered at this point. These are all things that will have to be studied, and we will study them," states Takla.

For Serageldin, the high expectations of the library are a sign of the high public support and interest in the project. He says the institution would have to defer on some aspirations in order to excel in several. "It will take a little bit of time for people to sort out their expectations, because some people expect things that the library shouldn't do," Serageldin says. "Organizing scientific research is not the responsibility of the library. Neither is doing what the Ministry of Culture already does. People project certain things on the library that are not realistic. But after a while of sticking to a clear set of priorities and linking our activities in terms of scholarship with the shows that we organize and the conferences, we hope we'll gradually establish a persona for the library."

As impossible as it is to bring the ancient Library of Alexandria back to life, the follow-through could be almost as challenging. At the core, the old and new share the goal of increasing humanity's collective understanding. By gathering the writings and scholars of all nations, the Great Library made possible a turning point in human science. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina today vows to foster dialogues that will offer solutions to pressing current problems."It's not a copy of the old library, but it gets its inspiration from the old library," says Holmquist.

"It's a revival of an idea," says El-Abbadi, "not of a building."

For more information on the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, go to http://www.bibalex.org/

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Recapturing the Spirit
If the Library of Alexandria is to reach the stature of its ancient namesake, the burden lies most squarely on its director, Dr. Ismail Serageldin