The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has held the official launch of the website of the World Digital Library at its headquarters in Paris. The launch was attended by the organization's Director-General, Koichiro Matsuura, and James H. Billington, U.S. Librarian of Congress, who proposed the project.
According to UNESCO's press release, the project aims to increase the quality and variety of the cultural offer on the Internet, through the provision of material such as books, manuscripts, maps, pictures, photos, music and paintings, which may be used by "educators, scholars, and general audiences". In addition, the library also has the goal of narrowing the "digital divide" and increasing the amount of "non-Western" content on the Internet. To achieve these objectives, the United States Library of Congress partnered with 32 other international institutions, including the Library of Alexandria.
The World Digital Library will be the third digital collection of this type, after Google Book Search and the Europeana Virtual Library.
The website is available in seven languages, including Portuguese, even while the country's national libraries and archives have declined to join this initiative. All materials available in Portuguese originate from Brazil. The other languages are Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, English and Russian.
Consult:
- World Digital Library http://www.wdl.org
Further information:
- UNESCO - Library of Congress and partners launch World Digital Library http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=44958&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
