Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Alexandria, Egypt)

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is the world's most ambitious modern revival of an ancient library, housing 8 million books on the Mediterranean coast. Its architecture supports four museums, a planetarium, and a decade-long digitization effort that has made over 200,000 texts freely accessible online, backed by 18 terabytes of web content archived annually via a pioneering Internet Archive mirror. With a printed volume capacity nearly 5 times that of the Vatican Apostolic Library (#8), it serves as a leading cultural beacon for North Africa and the Middle East, outperforming its peers in regional digital access.