Three years ago, freshman Mark Morad, born fully sighted, lost his eyesight completely. His dream of studying computer science seemed to slip away as he struggled to navigate documents like PDFs, PowerPoints, images and graphs for his science courses. He relied almost entirely on explanations from other people to understand the figures.

“I didn’t like that someone always had to explain these documents to me. So I got the idea of creating an app to solve this problem,” said Morad, explaining that he wanted to reclaim his independence in navigating documents and visuals online.

Five months after the idea struck him, Morad published the first version of ScribeMe on the Microsoft Store. “ScribeMe can take PowerPoint affiliates, extract all the text in these files and give detailed image descriptions using AI. So if someone has a visual impairment, they’ll be able to know all the visual content inside these files,” said Morad.

His app is at an advantage because it is able to take a large file and analyze all the images at once, a quality that he describes as unique. “If a file has 20 images, ScribeMe will describe all the images in seconds, which is faster than doing it manually, by sending one image at a time to AI.” 

Morad’s programming was a feat in itself given the challenges he faced during the process. “I was programming blind using only a screen reader, and coding is even harder when you can’t see because if you miss even one comma in a code, the whole app won’t work.”

“I didn’t like that someone always had to explain these documents to me. So I got the idea of creating an app to solve this problem."

Since its launch, the app has received a strong reception from the public, gaining users across 52 countries and winning several prestigious awards. Many foundations in the United States are also collaborating with ScribeMe to make their content more accessible.

The first contest Morad attended was the USAID-sponsored Vodafone AI Assistive Tools Hackathon, where 200 teams competed for EGP 900,000 in funding. “I was the youngest person in all of these teams,” said Morad. “My first impression when I went there was that of course we’re not gonna make it first, but at least we’re gonna try.” Morad was shocked when ScribeMe was announced as the first-place winner the next day. 

Since then, ScribeMe has gone on to win more awards. At the Empowering Inclusion in Employment competition by GIZ, ScribeMe was selected for a nine-month incubation program, with funding for the app and employee salaries provided to Morad’s team.

Morad has big hopes for ScribeMe’s future: “We’re creating a company built on ScribeMe, and we’re hoping to publish the app soon on the App Store and Google Play.” Morad is additionally undergoing the incorporation process and will soon seek investors and employees. “We’re working on improving the app and making the best possible product to help people with visual impairments be more independent,” he said.

Morad hopes to major in computer science and is enjoying his first semester at AUC, where he says the people are extremely nice and supportive. A guiding principle for Morad is to “never give up, never back down.”

AUC’s Libraries and Learning Technologies is collaborating with five leading U.S. academic institutions — Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, New York University, University of Michigan and College of Charleston — for the acquisition of the historical Maktabat al-Khanji Archive. The AUC Library will digitize materials from the archive while preserving the original collection in the University’s Rare Books and Special Collections Library. 

“AUC is ideally placed to house, curate, conserve, archive and digitize the collection in its library,” said Lamia Eid ’88, ’92, dean of Libraries and Learning Technologies at AUC. “Our collaboration with the five U.S. institutions, each bringing its own unique policies and procedures, has been both a testament to our shared conviction and profound understanding of the significance of this unique collection.”

“AUC is ideally placed to house, curate, conserve, archive and digitize the collection in its library.”

Belonging to one of the leading manuscript collectors, editors and publishers of Arabo-Islamic literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, Muhammad Amin al-Khanji, Maktabat al-Khanji has been at the center of the editing, printing and circulation of key Arabic and Islamic texts, providing a window onto the worlds of Arabic and Islamic manuscripts from the 1920s to the 1960s. “These archival materials reveal the intricate social relationships formed during that process between Muslim and non-Muslim European actors involved in the exchange of cultural and intellectual resources,” said Mostafa Hussein, assistant professor at the University of Michigan. 

Ahmad Khan, assistant professor of Islamic studies at AUC who has conducted research on this archive and Maktabat al-Khanji as a whole, emphasized the significance of this collection. “This archive can help set a new research agenda and subdiscipline in the field of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, revealing new connections between actors, institutions and publishing houses across the Middle East.” 

The Maktabat al-Khanji Archive has the potential to transform our modern-day understanding of book history and print culture in the Middle East and North Africa. The diverse material would be of critical interest to libraries, archivists and scholars of Arabo-Islamic intellectual thought, offering valuable insights in economic, book and provenance history as well as print culture, manuscript study and technology.

“This archive can help set a new research agenda and subdiscipline in the field of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, revealing new connections between actors, institutions and publishing houses across the Middle East.” 

“The al-Khānjī archive, for the first time, offers a perspective that was previously missing from the history of the region,” said Rana Mikati, associate professor at the College of Charleston. “Among other things, it corrects the narrative of the formation of European and North American collections of Islamic manuscripts that has emphasized the roles of foreign dealers and documents, their dependence on local actors and their expertise.”

Khan first met with the founder’s grandson, Mohammad Amin al-Khanj, in 2017, after which he began to research and examine some of the private documents of Maktabat al-Khanji. In 2023, Mikati and Garrett Davidson, associate professor at the College of Charleston, accessed and surveyed the entirety of the archive, furnishing a detailed inventory of the papers. Al-Khanji’s grandson chose to preserve the collection in Egypt after visiting AUC and touring the University’s library digitization lab and Rare Books and Special Collections Library. 

“The attempt to better understand the provenance of the Princeton University collection of Islamic manuscripts led me to the al-Khānjī archive,” said Davidson. “What I found in this archive provides intimate documentation of not only that story but a much larger one: a mass translocation of manuscripts at the core of many other collections in the Near East, Europe and beyond.” 

Sabine Schmidtke, professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, proposed the idea of a collaboration of institutions to preserve and study the collection and was the first to support the initiative, with help from the Gerard B. Lambert Foundation. The late William Noel of the Princeton University Library introduced and brought together the other four institutions to jointly support this project at AUC.

 “The al-Khānjī archive, for the first time, offers a perspective that was previously missing from the history of the region.”

“The Khānjī archive will open up new venues for the study of the history of Arabic manuscript and book collections throughout Europe and beyond,” said Schmidtke. “What is particularly gratifying is the fact that our six institutions have worked smoothly together to acquire this important archive and thus to hold it together as one, perhaps providing a model for the rescue of comparable archives whenever they become available.”

Upon acquiring the unique archive, the AUC Library immediately initiated efforts to preserve the collection. The first step is to ensure conservation of the material. This involves implementing appropriate measures to protect and maintain the physical condition of the items in the collection. Following the conservation efforts, the library will proceed with the processing, digitization and metadata creation for the archive. “These essential steps are crucial to make the collection accessible and valuable for researchers, the collaborating institutions and the scholarly community at large,” said Eid.