World Digital Library

The World Digital Library was officially inaugurated today at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO — the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — to much herald and acclaim. This new resource is a joint venture between UNESCO, the Library of Congress, and 31 other institutions spanning the globe. Their mission? To make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

They opened their collection today with about 1,200 documents, and the site’s navigation and content descriptions are available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Significant funding for the project came from Google, Microsoft, The Qatar Foundation, The Carnegie Foundation, The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, The Lawrence and Mary Anne Tucker Foundation, and The Bridging Nations Foundation.

Some buzz …

• Library of Congress press release
• UNESCO press release
• Washington Post, AFP, and BBC coverage
• Twitter chatter
• FriendFeed chatter

My initial thoughts about the site are that it’s easy to navigate and has a consistent approach to content with convenient features, such as the ability to zoom into documents and photographs with amazing clarity and detail. There is a handy timeline slider on the front page, so that you can narrow your search to certain dates and have the content pop up on the world map by location. Also, all the continents are well represented! What a treat to search across time, place, and institution so easily. The only drawback is the limited content (1,200 documents is really not that many). I’m also quite enamored of the Flickr Commons’ folksonomic tagging and crowdsourcing of knowledge, which of course this online library lacks.

On Twitter, we track the Library of Congress’s remarks …

@librarycongress: Factoid: The demonstration of the WDL prototype in 2007 was held at the Paris Hilton. True story. #wdl

@librarycongress: Press conference for World Digital Library had 104 journalists, apparently a UNESCO record. www.wdl.org #wdl

@librarycongress: At the World Digital Library launch in Paris. The president of Benin just walked by. HUGE entourage. #wdl

@librarycongress: Press conference announcing World Digital Library is overflowing. WDL.org #wdl http://twitpic.com/3pfnu

@librarycongress: 6 hours before “official” launch and WDL.org already has 700k pageviews today alone. #wdl http://twitpic.com/3pi66

@librarycongress: www.wdl.org More than 2 million page views today as of 1500 GMT. #wdl

Take a spin around the world at http://www.wdl.org/ — we think you’ll enjoy it.

Tags: Library of Congress, UNESCO, World Digital Library

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.