The International School of Information Science (ISIS) is a research institute affiliated to the BA. It acts as an incubator for digital and technological projects, thus promoting and nurturing innovations that encompass the spirit of the BA’s mission. Guided by the BA goals, ISIS strives to preserve heritage for future generations in digital form and to provide universal access to human knowledge, in addition to promoting research and development of activities and projects related to building a universal digital library. ISIS received an Award of Merit and the Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award (OCEA) from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2002.
Hence, the Digital Lab was constructed to be the key element in fulfilling this goal. Equipped with state-of-the-art technologies, the Digital Lab digitizes various media, including slides in multi-formats, negatives, books, manuscripts, pictures, and maps. In addition, it is being equipped with the necessary tools for indexing, archiving and managing the digital media. The Digital Lab acts as the corner-stone for digitizing BA collections as well as the collections of other international libraries that are interested in pursuing the goal of “Universal Access to Human Knowledge”.
Furthermore, ISIS aims to forge partnerships and collaborations with other institutions and IT centers locally and internationally believing that these partnerships act as a catalyst for emerging new technologies in the IT domain. Collaborations with CNRS (the French national center for scientific research), the Library of Congress, Yale University, Digital Library Federation (DLF) and others enrich research and implementation of pioneering digital ideas for the benefit of the international knowledge community.
In addition to partnerships, the BA, through ISIS, offers a platform for the collaboration of young scientists in Egypt and worldwide, owing to its ICT infrastructure whose components provide an opportune environment for researchers and higher education individuals. This includes a high bandwidth connectivity, a fully available data analysis facility (Virtual Immersive Science and Technology Applications), mass storage devices available for storing enormous amounts of data and finally, the availability of a High Performance Computing cluster, also known as the Supercomputer, that represents a new dimension in the scientific research domain, where it accommodates a computational ability at a rate equivalent to trillions of operations per second.
More information is available on: www.bibalex.org/isis