[Foundation-l] FW: [DIGLIB] Library of Congress plans world digital library

[Jakob]

Hi,

Her are some other people also trying to collect the knowledge of the 
world. We should get more in contact with them (for instance a 
presentation by LOC's activities at Wikimania 2006).

-----Original Message-----
From: Terry Kuny [mailto:terry at kuny.ca] Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 
2005 4:04 AM
To: DIGLIB
Subject: [DIGLIB] Library of Congress plans world digital library

Library of Congress plans world digital library
22 Nov 2005  02:08 ET

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. Library of Congress is 
kicking off a campaign on Tuesday to work with other nation's libraries 
to build a World Digital Library, starting with a $3 million donation 
from Google Inc.

Librarian of Congress James Billington said he is looking to attract 
further private funding to develop bilingual projects, featuring 
millions of unique objects, with libraries in China, India, the Muslim 
world and other nations.

This builds on major existing digital documentary projects by the 
Library of Congress -- one preserving an online record of Americana and 
another documenting ties between the United States and Brazil, France, 
the Netherlands, Russia and Spain.

"The World Digital Library is an attempt to go beyond Europe and the 
Americas...into cultures where the majority of the world is," 
Billington told Reuters in a telephone interview.

As an example, Billington said the Library of Congress is in 
discussions with the national library of Egypt to include a collection 
of great Islamic scientific works from the 10th through the 16th 
Century in the World Digital Library.

"We are trying to do a documentary record of other great cultures of 
the world. How much we will be able to do will depend on how many 
additional partners we attract," he said.
Over the past decade, the American Memory Project of the Library of 
Congress has digitized more than ten million items to create a 
documentary record of Americana. A link is located at: 
http://www.loc.gov/memory/.

These include manuscripts, maps, audiovisual recordings, cartoons, 
caricatures, posters, documentary photographs, music, and, to a lesser 
extent, historic books. The World Digital Library would draw on a 
similar variety of multimedia objects.

A second project, known as the Global Gateway and introduced in 2000, 
involves collaborations with five national libraries in Europe and 
Brazil that focus on documenting ties between each of those countries 
and U.S. culture.

(http://international.loc.gov/intldl/find/digital_collaborations.html/)

GLOBAL CULTURES
By contrast, the World Digital Library will focus on creating records 
of global cultures. The Library of Congress will contribute its own 
body of works to a blended collection with other countries. More than 
half of the printed volumes in the Library of Congress are in languages 
other than English.

"It will deal with the culture of those people rather than with our 
contacts as Americans with those cultures," Billington said.

Web search company Google has agreed to work with the Library of 
Congress on developing standards for indexing the digital collections 
and by providing computer equipment.

The Library of Congress push adds momentum to a variety of competing 
projects by leading Internet companies and some of the world's greatest 
libraries to make available online a range of historic literature, 
audio recordings and film archives.

The plans unveiled over the past year mark the most sustained drive yet 
to make good on the vision of Internet pioneers to open the world's 
library collections to a global online audience. The dream suffered 
from a lack of funding and the distractions of the dot-com era's 
get-rick-quick schemes.

Among these are a major push by Google with five major academic 
libraries to digitize their book collections.

Meanwhile, the Open Content Alliance, backed by Yahoo Inc. , Microsoft 
Corp. , the non-profit Internet Archive and other major libraries, is 
looking to create an online clearinghouse for historic books, audio and 
films.

The Google Print project has been met with lawsuits by the New 
York-based Authors Guild and five U.S. publishers who are seeking to 
block Google's plan to create an online card catalog of copyright works 
in the collections of its library partners.

(Editing by Anthony Barker. Tel: +1 415 677 3919;
eric.auchard at reuters.com)