Director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) Ismail Serageldin signed a partnership agreement with Director of the National Library of France Bruno Racine.

The inking came in a ceremony that was attended by Ghada Abdel Bari, the acting cultural attache at the Egyptian Embassy in Paris, and a raft of senior cultural figures in the French community.

By virtue of the agreement, the BA receives an annual grant of 1,500 recently-published French books, in cooperation with a number of French publishers.

Serageldin told MENA that the partnership came to maintain cooperation between both sides that lasted for the past few years.

The BA is the fourth largest library in the world with regard to possessing French books, he added.