Ismail Serageldin Quotes

Ismail Serageldin , Founding Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina , the new Library of Alexandria, inaugurated in 2002, is currently, Emeritus Librarian, and member of the Board of Trustees of the Library of Alexandria. He serves as Chair or Member of a number of advisory committees for academic, research, scientific and international institutions and civil society efforts, including as co-Chair of the Nizami Ganjavi International Center , and serves on the Advisory Committee of the World Social Science Report for 2013 and 2016, as well as the UNESCO-supported World Water Scenarios and the executive council of the Encyclopedia of Life and Chairs the Executive Council of the World Digital Library . He also co-chaired the African Union's high level panel for Biotechnology and again for Science, Technology and Innovation in 2012-2013, and was a member of the ICANN Panel for the review of the internet future .

Before that he notably co-chaired the Inter-Academy Panel on Capacity Building for Science in and was a member of the High Level group for the Alliance of Civilizations convened by the Secretary General of the United Nations . He has held many important international positions, including Vice President of the World Bank , and Chairman Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research , founder and former Chairman of the Global Water Partnership and the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest , a micro finance program and was professor of the International Savoirs Contre Pauvreté , at Collège de France, Paris, and distinguished professor at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Serageldin is sometimes referred to as the "most intelligent man in Egypt".Serageldin has published over 100 books and monographs and over 500 papers on a variety of topics, including biotechnology, rural development, sustainability, and the value of science to society. He has hosted a cultural program on television in Egypt and developed a TV Science Series in Arabic and English. He holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Engineering from Cairo University and a master's degree and a Ph.D. from Harvard University and has received 38 honorary doctorates.In August 2017, an Egyptian judge sentenced Serageldin to three and a half years in prison, for alleged management decisions he made prior to 2011.

Over 300 eminent persons, including 90 Nobel Prize winners and 20 current and former heads of state, signed a letter supporting Serageldin and objecting to the verdict, and the case was appealed.On the 26th of December, 2017, the Appeals Court delivered its verdict and dismissed all the charges against Ismail Serageldin. The Court found that all the accusations were baseless. Ismail Serageldin is now declared innocent of all the allegations made against him during the previous seven years. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. May 1944
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Ismail Serageldin: 1   quote 0   likes

Ismail Serageldin Quotes

“I do believe that encyclopedias are dead as dodos in the old fashioned way. Let me just go back, because earlier around I was interviewed and I said: The book will always be with us. Books - we used to read in scrolls and then they got invented the codex which is basically the form of the book. It has not been improved on. It's like scissors, like a spoon, and like a hammer. It's technology that's perfect in itself and will remain very good. But: What about the content inside of it? Now, there are books that you read for information. And there what you want to do is how to get the information. And it is infinitely more efficient, of higher quality, to use digital sources rather than the published sources for references. So dictionaries and encyclopedias are not going to be done in this very ponderous way of having old books that by the time they come out the information in them is obsolete. Second, you have to search in all of these and open the pages and then you go to an index and come back whereas you can type to search in. […] But if you want to hold in your hand a slim volume, nicely bound, of the love sonnets of Shakespeare or historical romans, that's a different story. There is the book as artifact, there is the joy in holding the book. And there is an efficiency in the book that you can carry with you in different ways. But I think that the encyclopedias and the dictionaries really are providing a service. And that service can be provided so much more efficiently online that they are bound to change. And if they don't change themselves and go online themselves … I mean, the old providers, like Britannica, will go online, will provide it, and will try to, in fact, compete with the model that Wikipedia pioneered.”

Wikimania 2008 press conference 0'33 (August 2008).

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