UNESCO launched the World Digital Library last Tuesday. It promises to have primary source documents (manuscripts, books, illustrations, photographs, etc) from countries and cultures around the world. It is being develop in conjunction with a number of institutions and libraries from around the world and is available in six languages, including Arabic. Currently, it has only about 1200 documents online, an embarrassingly small number for World library but, I guess, it is just starting. It is of interest that they will not only deal with institutions but will consider publishing documents from private collections and archives as well.
If it achieves its goal, it will be a very important resource. As with any such endeavor though, I fear that countries with resources and digital savvy will have flood the library with their documents and the resources of the "world" digital library will not really be representative. As is stands, the number of documents seem fairly well balanced from different regions of the world. Of course, this may be just to be politically correctness coinciding with the launch of the library. It will be interesting to see how it evolves.
1 comment:
thanks for the link. I checked it out and it looked pretty good.
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