The World Digital Library: a treasures gift from U.N
6:00 PM | View Comments | Education, Education and Training, Media sharing
Today UN cultural agency launched The World Digital Library. The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.launched by the UN's cultural agency.Among the artefacts are a 1,000-year-old Japanese novel and the earliest known map to mention America by name.
About a tenth of the 1,200 exhibits are from Africa - the oldest an 8,000-year-old painting of bleeding antelopes.
But this is an ongoing project in its early stages, and the collection is expected to grow substantially.
The World Digital Library was first mooted in 2005 by James Billington, librarian at the US Library of Congress, the world's biggest library.
The project hopes to expand access to "non-Western" items - though the largest number of items digitised so far are from Europe.
The material is drawn from about 30 libraries and archives across the world, and will be made available in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
By making cultural treasures accessible to a huge audience, Unesco also hopes to reduce what it sees as a digital divide between rich and poor.
The project is the third such big digitalisation project. Last year the European Union's digital library crashed within hours of its launch, but it is up and running now.
About a tenth of the 1,200 exhibits are from Africa - the oldest an 8,000-year-old painting of bleeding antelopes.
But this is an ongoing project in its early stages, and the collection is expected to grow substantially.
The World Digital Library was first mooted in 2005 by James Billington, librarian at the US Library of Congress, the world's biggest library.
The project hopes to expand access to "non-Western" items - though the largest number of items digitised so far are from Europe.
The material is drawn from about 30 libraries and archives across the world, and will be made available in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
By making cultural treasures accessible to a huge audience, Unesco also hopes to reduce what it sees as a digital divide between rich and poor.
The project is the third such big digitalisation project. Last year the European Union's digital library crashed within hours of its launch, but it is up and running now.
