Over 2,300 years ago, people traveled from all over the region to study at the library at Alexandria, Egypt, the best-stocked facility of its age. Now a new library is set to open along the same shores of Egypt’s oldest Mediterranean city.

And unlike their predecessors, visitors to the new library will be able to pursue their scholarship in comfort; the facility’s equipment is being provided by Carrier Corporation (Syracuse, NY, www.carrier.com). Miraco-Carrier supplied the system for Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which was scheduled to open to the public last month. The cooling system provides a total of 14,000 tons of cooling and is located in a basement mechanical room of the 11-floor library.

Located where Euclid taught geometry centuries ago, the 743,000-sq-ft building will accommodate up to 8 million volumes; house hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, audio tapes, CDs, and videotapes; and will serve as a center for research into the civilizations of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Eastern Mediterranean. It also includes a 3,200-person conference center, a science museum, planetarium, and a calligraphy institute. The Ptolemies founded the original Bibilotheca Alexandrina around 300 BC, making the city one of the ancient centers of academia; however, the collections and volumes of the original library were destroyed by fire 1,600 years ago.