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| Picture taken from RBSCL main webpage at aucegypt.edu |
That’s exactly what you’ll get when you visit the online page of the University on the Square (UOTS): Documenting Egypt’s 21st Century Revolution project. This project is headed by the Rare Books and Special Collections Library (RBSCL) at the American University in Cairo (AUC).
We all remember that day when former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down. Well, it was not only cheers and celebration that followed in the upcoming weeks, but a group of dedicated AUC personnel trying to decide on what to do with this valuable moment in time.
There was a lot of memory laying out there that marked this moment, from the photographs, videos, banners, weapons, arts and so much more.
“Lisa Anderson approached several administrators, staff members, librarians, and others to create a steering group committee to launch a project along these lines,” said Stephen Urgola, University Archivist in the RBSCL at AUC.
The group met in a series of meetings starting from the very first week when Mubarak stepped down. They would meet in the AUC housing facilities in the Zamalek district and discuss this potential project. This resulted with the team creating a grant proposal within the next few weeks, which landed them an agreement with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for 50,000 dollars.
And so the project was initiated in February 2011.
On the project webpage, the UOTS describes their function as preserving “the history of the 18 Days in Egypt and beyond by collecting content from activists, participants, and observers from the American University in Cairo as well as members of the larger Egyptian and global communities.”
Initially, the project reserved itself to interviewing revolutionary participants from the AUC community and hence the name “University on the Square”. However, they decided to broaden their search to a much bigger community – Egypt.
The project accepts both Work Study students and volunteers to participate in the collection of such materials. How it works is, the volunteers are either matched with interviewees or are asked to contact interviewees. It does look simple. However, every new project starts off on rocky roads.
“Sometimes you have to deal with cancellations, sometimes you have to deal with people who say they want to be interviewed and decide not to, say they want to donate and decide not to,” said Lauren Clark, project coordinator of the UOTS project at the RBSCL.
The interviews were normally held on the New Cairo campus, the Tahrir campus and very few times at the AUC housing in the Zamalek district. Places and timings were often scheduled to meet the interviewee’s convenience.
However, convenience alone does not guarantee the success of the interview as “the Tahrir campus was closed often times so interviews had to be rescheduled, they were cancelled, so our facilities were not always available,” said Urgola.
Despite the many unfortunate incidents, the project did triumph over the past two years. Many interviews have been collected, more people are interested, the list of potential interviews grew longer and some volunteers are taking the initiative to seek solutions independently.
Urgola explained that the project started with the idea of interviewing prominent people like Mohamed Baradei, Wael Ghoneim as well as Nabil Fahmy and Rabab El-Mahdi. In time, they not only realized that it would be hard to tackle them down but that it was almost more valuable to have every day people going on record about the revolution.
“But it’s the person who is a protestor at the Square, that’s the story that wasn’t going to be put out there … unless we captured it,” he said.
