The Syrian media witnessed the emergence of a large number of prints following the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution in March 2011. By the end of 2014, the number exceeded 200 prints; yet about 70% percent of them stopped issuing.
Despite their variety in content and place of issuance, the Syrian prints lost a significant part of its influence on the public due variety of reasons related to printing, technical issues and marketing. For example, publishing on inconvenient platforms that varies in quality, features, and accessibility forced those interested in following the prints to subscribe to large numbers of webpages and websites, such as Facebook pages, Scribed, Google Drive, Media Fire, Issuu. Moreover, some prints does not have publishing platforms and its publication is limited via e-mail or Facebook albums; neither of which provides archiving services. In addition, some of websites of prints that stopped issuing were taken down as their subscriptions were not renewed.
The emergence of these prints, no doubt, represents a significant landmark in the development of the Syrian media, yet its importance does not lie in that alone. The intellectual, literary, political, social and economic content is an essential part of the Syrian memory and history; it documents a vital stage of Syria’s recent history, and tracks its changes and development through a variant range of means and contents of media coverage provided by these prints.
There for, the necessity for saving and archiving Syrian prints in one inclusive website emerged; and thus the Syrian Prints Archive was conceived.
The services the website provides:
- Documenting and archiving new Syrian prints (newspapers, magazines, and periodicals) issued after the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution.
- Making all Syrian prints available on one website, obviating the need to search and surf through tabs of websites and social media webpages.
- Providing basic information about Syrian prints, including contact info.
- Classifying and categorizing the Syrian prints according to place of issuance, periodicity of issuance and affiliations.
- Correcting misprints related to dates of issuance, in addition to converting Hijri calendar to western calendar to enhance the search.
- Providing surfing, sharing, rating, downloading, and printing features.
- Providing search within a specified time frame and within texts in PDF files.
The Search engine:
The search engine was developed to provide sufficient service to search the important contents of the prints. The mechanism depends on “Time Scale” that provides access to specific journalistic materials linked to certain historical or political events, through searching newspapers issued within two specified dates.
The websites also programmed the search engine to convert the PDF files into hidden text files, thus expanding the search process to include the contents of the PDF files.
Note: this feature only refers to the print that includes the specified key phrase in the search, but does not provide direct access to the specified phrase in the print itself.
The search engine provides quick search boxes according to prints’ name, and place and periodicity of issuance.
“Syrian Prints Archive” is an independent documentary project, that works on archiving periodic Syrian prints issued since the outbreak of the March 2011 Revolution, as these prints are a part of the Syrian written memory, and a facet of the new-born pluralism in Syria.
- To manifest the reflected political and social pluralism in the media since it’s the actual translation of a society freeing itself from repression.
- To archive and categorize the periodic issues throughout all stages of the Syrian revolution, in order to prevent its loss; this will ultimately facilitate preserving Syria’s history and forming the memory of the Syrians.
- To make all Syrian written and published materials available in the form of periodicals available to the public in one website.
- To enhance the search process in texts of periodic issues, in addition to offering advanced search tools that help researchers, scholars, and those interested.
- To promote communication and collaboration among concerned individual and organizations.
In 2013, an offshoot of Enab Baladi Newspaper team started the work through saving links to Syrian prints issued following the outbreak of the revolution, and publishing them weekly. However, several technical problems arose such as broken links and the difficulty of surfing back to older prints that are published only via social media.
Thus, the team developed the work and started collecting the materials, saving them on external hard drives, and then republishing them via a separate inclusive website that provides a number of surf, search, rate, download and print features.
The official launch of the beta-version of the website was on Nov. 21st 2014, during the first Conference of Syrian Journalists Association in Gaziantep, sponsored by NPA.
During its early stages, the project was called “Alternative Syrian Media”. Later, in response to the advice of a number of media workers and specialists, the name was changed to “Syrian Prints Archive” as the meaning the word “alternative” bears does not accord fully with the objectives of the project; it is likely that the Syrian new prints –in general- will be Syria’s main media.
Syrianprints.org is an independent website, free of any political, partisan or religious affiliations. It provides archiving and storing services to all available Syrian prints regardless of their content or orientations.
The website’s archiving process does not differentiate between one print and another; the process includes classifying and categorizing them, alphabetically, according to place of issuance, periodicity of issuance, and affiliations. These classifications are based on the information available and disclosed by the prints themselves.