Launch of the World Digital Library

The world is atwitter with the news of the launch of the World Digital Library, literally. The Twitter social networking site was abuzz with hundreds of tweets about the inauguration, including tweets in Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian, as well as other languages.


In 2005, at the first meeting of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO after the United States reentered its community of nations, James Billington took advantage of his opening plenary address to lay our a vision of the World Digital Library. He proposed an online collection, global in scope and catalyzed by UNESCO, that would be modeled after the Library of Congress' American Memory, a website that provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience. At the time of his talk, the American Memory already contained 40 million entries.

Billington's proposal, that the United States delegation take his proposal to UNESCO, was enthusiastically accepted by the members of the National Commission. Since that time the proposal has been exhaustively reviewed and approved by UNESCO's governing bodies. A number of national libraries and the Library of Alexandria joined in the effort. $10 million has been raised, including $3 million from Google.

This week the World Digital Library was made available with 1,200 documents and their explanations from scholars in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. But it is designed to accommodate an unlimited number of such texts, charts and illustrations from as many countries and libraries as want to contribute.

Read the article describing the launch in:

• The Washington Post
• The New York Times
  

New digital library to display world on a website

Huexotzinco Codex, 1531, documenting in pictographic language part of the testimony in a legal case against representatives of the colonial government in Mexico, ten years after the Spanish conquest in 1521. Photograph: Library of Congress

The Guardian has an article today on the forthcoming World Digital Library. I quote:

Four years after Washington's Librarian of Congress, Dr James Billington, suggested the idea, curators have accomplished the first stage in the construction of a truly global library. With all material free of charge on a website translated into seven different languages, the WDL is expected to be an unrivalled educational tool.

"We hope that this brings cultures together, that it promotes better understanding between those cultures and that it provides educational uses for a world in which reading and scholarship have to face competition from 24/7 media," said John Van Oudenaren, the director of the project.

Read more!

UNESCO and US Library of Congress -- The World Digital Library

UNESCO and the US Library of Congress will join forces to build a World Digital Library, following the signing of an agreement by James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress and, Abdul Waheed Khan, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 17 October 2007.

The World Digital Library initiative will digitize unique and rare materials from libraries and other cultural institutions around the world and make them available free of charge on the Internet. These materials include manuscripts, maps, books, musical scores, sound recordings, films, prints and photographs.

Read more about this initiative.

And still more on the World Digital Library.