"AUC Lectures in the Nineties" Audio Documentary

Since the American university in Cairo was established in 1919, it played a major role in promoting an understanding across world cultures, regions, and religions. The university being in Egypt, a culturally rich country in every sense of the word, and an eminent country in the Middle East, was an additional asset to AUC’s mission of bringing together various cultures and ideas.

The AUC Administration managed to turn AUC into a melting pot, where cultural understanding is fostered through introducing a wide range of diversity. The faculty members at AUC, the staff, and the students all come from different countries, cultures, and social classes.

The interaction among people from different backgrounds in a liberal environment enriched the lives of many people involved with AUC along the years. Accordingly, AUC over the past century, contributed to culturally shaping many young minds that later became leaders on the Egyptian scene, and in the region of the Middle East like Gamal Moubarak.

The lectures given at AUC were always an extremely essential component to the role of AUC as a bridge, connecting many cultures, views and ideologies.

Project #5: Radio story

(Creswell room)



(Debbane Room)


(AUC Library, Archive in last floor)




Script:

Since the early 1970s, the University Archives of the American University in Cairo played a big role in collecting, preserving and providing access to materials with historical value created by various AUC units.

The services of the AUC archives are of aid to faculty and student researchers, but the materials were very difficult to reach and use because of the huge amount of files and documents stored.

Now 2 projects in progress were started by the AUC record management that will greatly facilitate accessing materials in the archives.


Steve Urgola, the university archivist, and director of records management is overseeing the creation of an online Index for materials stored as well as digitizing the materials and putting it online.

natsnd of Steve Urgola:

Steve: “We started a new system last year with the help of our digital archivist to take our word files of indexes and put them in the AUC catalogue, so you can search the name of an AUC president for example or a department, and if we have those records that include that name or topic, the system will retrieve the index to that collection.”

Digitizing will not only help preserve a lot of the highly valuable materials in the archive, but also will provide access to the materials through a website related to the AUC library.

Streve “we set up this Dspace system, named AUC Dar, it‘s a digital archive and repository and it’s gives us the chance to hold all kinds of electronic records, student thesis, faulty publications, student projects, scanned items or audio files from the rare books library.”

The collection of the AUC archive is enormous, and it might be years before the digitizing process is completed, plus not all types of collections are being digitized. Terra Kridler, the Digital Collections Archivist said that only a very small portion of the collections were scanned. She also mentioned that not all types of archival material are equally being digitized.

natsnd of Terra Kridler:

Terra Kridler: “we‘ve actually gotten steady collections of materials but not nearly all of the holdings, not even close.”

Members of the AUC administration are supporting the project but there are still not enough resources or staff members to help finalize the project on a set date.

A very small amount of the documentaries, the photographs and the audio records are actually online in digital form but that will change dramatically in the next two years as the AUC DAR project will save AUC a lot of money, space and energy as well as making the life of researchers much easier.