20091215

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt has begun making its national archives digitally available on the Internet in Arabic, having last month registered the world's first domain name in Arabic script.

The initiative to boost use of Arabic on the Web was launched on Monday following the domain name registration, which opened the Internet to millions of Arabic speakers put off by a language barrier.

Analysts say Arabic is just 1 per cent of Web content.

Egypt, the first of nine Arab countries to have registered so far, has adopted the domain name .misr -- the Arabic word for Egypt and which will be spelt in Arabic script.

Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tarek Kamel said both initiatives are part of the country's push to boost Arabic e-content and broaden access to Arabic speakers.

"In the future this (digital processing of Egypt's National Archives) will be very useful when we have the Arabic domain really operational," Communications and Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel told Reuters.

"We are now preparing the content in Arabic that really reflects the long history of Egypt in digital form," he added.

Internet regulator ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, says the new Arabic domains are expected to start working during 2010.