Dr Ismail Serageldin was invited to give a plenary lecture "Building the Global Knowledge Society" at the 2012 AAAS Annual Meeting which was to be held 16--20 February 2012, Vancouver, Canada. Unfortunately due to the political situation in Egypt he was unable to travel, so he decided to record the lecture at the Studio of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and make it available to the organizers of the meeting to have it run to the participants as scheduled on the set program, which was to be on Sunday 19 February 2012 at 6.00 pm. The lecture was extremely well received and accordingly, upon the request of many, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA), the new Library of Alexandria, is making the recording and the full text available.