UNESCO Launches World Digital Library

Bravo to UNESCO which, with 32 partner institutions, under the guidance of James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress, today launched the Bibliothèque Numérique Mondiale (BNM), or World Digital Library (WDL). The library will offer on the website http://www.wdl.org/ the world's accumulated knowledge in seven languages for students everywhere. Adding to the six official languages of the UN (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish), the site includes materials in Portuguese. It will feature unique cultural materials from libraries and archives from around the world, and will include manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, and prints and photographs. It will provide unrestricted public access, free of charge, to this material.

The library has started with about 1,200 documents and their explanations from scholars. It is designed to accommodate an unlimited number of such texts, charts and illustrations from as many countries and libraries as want to contribute. The digital library's main server is also in Washington, but officials said plans are underway for regional servers around the world.

According to the UNESCO website, the WDL was developed by a team at the Library of Congress. Technical assistance was provided by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina of Alexandria, Egypt. Institutions contributing content and expertise to the WDL include national libraries and cultural and educational institutions in Brazil, Egypt, China, France, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Sweden, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The digital library's main server is in Washington, but plans are underway for regional servers around the world.

Current offerings include rubbings of oracle bones from the National Library of China, delicate drawings of court life from the National Diet Library of Japan and a 13th-century "Devil's Bible" from the National Library of Sweden. Each is accompanied by a brief explanation of its content and significance. The documents have been scanned onto the site directly, in their original languages, but the explanations appear in all seven of the site's official languages.

Users can sort through the information in several ways. They can ask what was going on anywhere in the world in, say, science or literature during the 4th century B.C., for instance. They can look up the history of a certain topic over the centuries in China alone, or in China and North America. By cross-referencing, a user can see how one area of the world compared with another at any given time. Materials also can be viewed by Place, Time, Topic, Type of Item and Institution.

This phenomenal site adds to work being done through Google and several universities to make books available online, and to the collaborative effort by Wikipedia in producing an encyclopedia of the world's knowledge.