FROM NIGEL PARRY, BIRZEIT UNIVERSITY WEBMASTER
Note: While the appeal has been running for over six months, items listed are still required. See the list for more details. Birzeit Webmaster, 6 April 1997.
As you will have noticed, we have spent this week providing a website to communicate from the ground on recent developments to interested parties around the world. The project, to the best of my knowledge, represents the first attempt by a non-media institution to offer a website with detailed, daily updates during a conflict situation. The site was used by activists in the U.S. and others around the world as a visual and testimony of the events in Palestine.
Although we were working late hours during the first several days of the crisis and some of our personnel were taking personal risks to bring you the news, the real difficulties encountered during this project were not these. Rather we found it difficult to produce the site with the existing equipment available to Birzeit University.
The vast majority of the Birzeit University website has been produced on IBM-compatable 486 and some 386 machines, some with as little as 4 MB RAM. Those of you involved with graphics production, even of the low resolution necessary for the Web, will appreciate how slow this process is. We have no digital cameras, something which would have freed us from the problems we faced when Ramallah went on strike and no photographic developers were availale for several days. In the end, we convinced one shop owner to open specially, to develop our films for us. Neither do we have video cameras and related "frame grabbers", which would have allowed us a greater option of choice in presenting images. The main university campus has one accessible image scanner. Our webserver is a 386 IBM-compatable with 8 MB RAM, making the kind of numbers of hits we were getting at the height of this crisis dangerously close to overloading the machine.
Birzeit University is currently funded 60% by the European Community, in common with other Palestinian universities. There are no university funds available to develop our Internet services. The university has been working on a funding proposal for "The Palestine Archive" which - if it currently existed - would have meant that a full-time Web News Team would have been available to more regularly update the "on the ground in ramallah" site. It would have also meant that faster computers, video and sound cards, slide/negative and flatbed scanners, digital cameras, DAT recorders for sound and other equipment would have been available to facilitate the process.
I am therefore appealing for support for this and the modular "Palestine Archive" funding proposal, which will solve these problems. One of the most important modules of this proposal provides for a 4-5 person news team, located in the various towns of the West Bank and Gaza, each armed with digital cameras, laptop computers and e-mail access. This way there could be daily, independent and detailed English-language reporting with images (layout space is not a problem when you have your own webserver!) from this country, and the individuals would be excellently placed to cover events such as those we have witnessed this last week.
Equipment Cost
3 Pentium+ (686) computers $2,000 each (1 received) 1 Pentium upgrade $600 1 flatbed scanner $800 1 slide/negative scanner $1,000 (received) 2 Web quality digital cameras $500-$800 each (received) 1 video camera $1,500 1 video recorder & colour TV $2,000 1 frame grabber/video blaster (captures video images) $500 1 DAT recorder (for sound on the Web) $1,000
Individuals who wish to help that may not have the kind of financial resources to support a large project are encouraged to donate small items, eg. digital cameras. Donors will be kept abreast of the way the equipment is being used and will be thanked publicly for their support on the Birzeit University website. More details are available by writing to webmaster@birzeit.edu. We will also be posting the complete Palestine Archive proposal on the website at some point soon.
Birzeit University has several accounts and funding channels for those wishing to donate by BANK TRANSFER. For regular cheques, please send to Webmaster, Public Relations Office, Birzeit University, P.O. Box 14, Birzeit, West Bank, Palestine:
JERUSALEM: Mercantile Discount Bank, Branch 638, Salah Eddin Street, East Jerusalem. Tel: +972-2-287-815 (Manager) or 282-438/985. Fax: +972-2-286-321. Account Number: 919-1-426660 for US$ or 919-8-454990 for DM. Notify Webmaster of any transfers via the Public Relations Office, Birzeit University, P.O. Box 14, Birzeit, West Bank. Tel: +972-2-998-2059/75. Fax: +972-2-995-7656. E-mail: webmaster@birzeit.edu.
UNITED KINGDOM: Friends of Birzeit University, British registered charity no.279026, 5 Collingham Road, London SW5 ONU. Tel: +44-373-8414. Fax: +44-835-2088. No e-mail as yet. Account Number & Bank Address: 54000629, Unity Trust Bank Plc, Sort Code 08-60-01. Bank Address: 4, The Square, 111 Broad Street, Birmingham B15 1AR. Contact FoBZU for details of how to increase any gift over 250 UK pounds through Gift Aid. Please notify FoBZU of any bank transfers, quoting "Birzeit Web Equipment Appeal" in any correspondence.
UNITED STATES: Arab Bank N.Y., P.O. Box 950666, 520 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y 10022. Tel: +1-212-715-9700. Fax: +1-212-593-4632 or 223-3175. Account Number: 7001-600007-051 for US$. Notify Webmaster of any transfers via the Public Relations Office, Birzeit University, P.O. Box 14, Birzeit, West Bank. Tel: +972-2-998-2059/75. Fax: +972-2-995-7656. E-mail: webmaster@birzeit.edu.
All donations and expenditure will be dealt with transparently, and details are available by request from the Webmaster. We will be instituting an on-line information service with funding news in the Birzeit & the Web section of our website.
To close, the kind of reporting we have produced during the week has only been possible through the willingness of individuals to work hard, long hours under difficult conditions. I wish to thank the following Birzeit staff for their help in constructing the "on the ground" website: Marwan Tarazi, Rania Baramki, Cathi Grosso, Hanan Elmasu and Bassem Nasir. Departments to be thanked include the Computer Center and Continuing Education Department for use of their resources. Thanks to Dr. Hanna Nasir, University President for his support of our Web endeavours and to Albert Aghazarian for his enthusiastic advice on this new journey on which the Public Relations Office has found itself. Special thanks must be given to Yasser Darweesh, Birzeit University photographer, as well as Kifah al-Fani and Saleem Daoud, Birzeit student photographers, all of whom did an excellent job in getting us almost all the images we could have dreamed of getting during this significant period in Palestinian history. Shukran jazilan ilkum.
Nigel Parry
Birzeit University Webmaster
webmaster@birzeit.edu
4 October 1996, updated 9 October