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- I now ask Ms Consul General of France Marie Christine Glas

- to come and introduce her address.

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- Good morning everyone,

- Ladies and gentlemen, I will start with a quotation from the Latin,

- scripta manant, verba volant,

- that is to say "writing stays, talk vanishes".

- Quite simply to underline that since cave men

- and including the Romans and many others, up to the invention of the radio,

- it is what Man’s hand left visible and readable

- that supported the cultural heritage of our societies

- and that let historians of following generations trace their way of life.

- The invention of the radio, the cinema, of television,

- led to an incredible cultural and social revolution

- not to talk about the political and economic impact of those new media.

- The principle of protection of this audiovisual heritage is quiet new.

- If it is now widely accepted, its implementation is still not very extended,

- and however the protection of those documents is needed

- because they definitely belong to our cultural heritage.

- Sound and footage are fixed into our daily lives.

- General broadcasting, their popular aspect,

- turn them into a favored media of our societies and the issues going with,

- with at the same time that they open a tremendous field for artistic creation

- at the reach of every artist and every audience.

- In a fast-moving world, they are an irreplaceable medium

- to witness and decipher contemporary history.

- And yet most of this world visual heritage

- may be destroyed or hardly accessed to.

- It a part of collective memory that is under the threat of planned disappearing.

- France, through the National Institute for Audiovisual (INA),

- stands as a pioneering figure in the field of protection

- but especially in the field of enhancement of audiovisual archives.

- At the time of the development of new media: Internet, phones...

- the protection of footage thanks to digitalization also takes on an economic,

- but also political and cultural aspect.

- As France won the battle for cultural diversity,

- it also acted as a pioneering figure in the development of international cooperation

- around the theme of the protection of archives.

- It was very active within the European Union

- in the promotion of large-scale actions in order to protect this heritage.

- And because we are in Alexandria,

- I will quote the audio-visual EUROMED 1 and now EUROMED 2 programs

- which were developed within the MEDA programs.

- During the first step the INA conducted CAPMED,

- gifted with close to 4 million Euros, which objective was:

- to protect and restore archives from the Mediterranean collaborating countries,

- as well as the setting up of a reference data base about those archives.

- Let’s hope that it will possible to go on with this action.

- I know that Egypt is, through the Union of Egyptian radios and televisions,

- with the collaboration of the French Embassy and the INA,

- also about to set a project for the digitalization of its news footage.

- I greet every television member and representative of the Near and Middle East

- along with the organizations that contribute to the influence and success of this seminar.

- CMCA, COPEAM, International Federation of Television Archives, INA of course,

- and the Bibliotheca that accepted to host this event.

- This one could only be set into such an appropriate place.

- Alexandria is a memory site, a cultural site with numerous identities.

- This town perfectly exemplifies the theme of this seminar,

- “between images from the past and technologies of the future”.

- A city that is still tinged with history but that firmly looks towards modernity

- as shown by, it has already been said, the creation of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina,

- that has the ambition to be the heir of Great Library of Alexandria

- counting on the most advanced technologies

- to protect and broadcast knowledge.

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