From: ElHassan ElSabry <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2016 18:28:50 +0900

Dear List Members,

The Egyptian government have recently launched a website under the
name of "Egyptian Knowledge Bank". The State Information Service
claims it to be the biggest digital library in the world. It provides
access "free of charge" to Egyptian citizens (categorized to four
groups: researchers, students, children & general readers) to a
multitude of resources including e-journals, textbooks, k-12
curricula, educational videos, and many other things. It also includes
a platform to manage journals published by university departments. The
list of 26 content providers include Elsevier, Springer-Nature, Sage,
Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, Emerald, OUP, CUP and the Royal Society of
Chemistry, among others like Cengage learning.

The website (www.ekb.eg) is only accessible using an Egyptian IP
address and the National ID card number is required to create account.
It does have the disadvantage of content being mostly in English
(especially for the "non-researcher" categories of citizens). However,
for many Egyptian researchers it is of great help. Many of them use to
suffer from the poor level of access provided at their home
institutions.

Following Liblicense-L for sometime, I do not often see posts from
members coming from developing countries. So, I am not sure how well
represented they are. But I would appreciate feedback from any one
interested. I want to know if you are aware of similar experiences
(even on a smaller scale) with other developing countries. Egypt has
the population of about 90 millions and its research landscape
includes 25 public universities, about 30 public research institutes
with over 110,000 of active researchers (headcount, not FTE) and about
a million university students (both undergraduate & postgraduate).

If your interested in more details about the project, you can check my
post on the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) 's Backchannels
blog.
( http://www.4sonline.org/blog/post/some_thoughts_on_the_egyptian_knowledge_bank
)


Thank you in advance.

ElHassan ElSabry
Doctoral Candidate
Science, Technology & Innovation Policy Program
National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Japan