Wednesday, April 19, 2006

The Stockholm Challenge

An Egypt heritage project has been chosen as a finalist in the Stockholm Challenge.

The first is the digitization of the Napoleonic Description De l’Egypte, carried out by the :
http://www.stockholmchallenge.se/projectdata.asp?id=1&projectid=1199
"The valuable collection of Description De l’Egypte containing text and images related to antiquities, natural history, and the modern states of Egypt, has been fully digitized, digitally restored, and integrated on a virtual browser with the objective of preserving it and making it publicly available. . . . This project was initiated within the International School of Information Science (ISIS). Founded as a research institute within the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), ISIS acts as an incubator for digital and technological projects, promoting and nurturing innovations which view the encompassing aims of the BA as an end goal."

A second project which has also made the list of finalists is the Our Natural Heritage at Risk project, from Egypt's CultNat:
"The project provides online information using multi lingual multimedia about Egypt's endangered animals and plants species.The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) annually publishes a list of endangered animal and plant species in each country. This list includes native mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, molluscs, insects and plants that have been assessed as being at risk of extinction on a global level (a Red Data list). The Egyptian Red Data list (2002) includes 35 mammals, 20 birds, 6 reptiles, 10 marine fishes and mollusks and two plant species."

The winner of the Stockholm Challenge will be announced on May 11th 2006. A list of all the finalists can be found at:
http://event.stockholmchallenge.se/finalists.php?id=wsis

See the above pages for full details of each of the finaliststs.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Description... project is interesting. I wonder if they know about the (admittedly clunky) version at Gallica?
http://gallica.bnf.fr/Catalogue/noticesInd/FRBNF33341149.htm

-Chuck Jones-