[InetBib] FW: [DIGLIB] Library of Congress plans world digital library

["Gragert, Gerrit" <gerrit.gragert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hallo,

folgende Mail wurde heute morgen über DIGLIB verteilt, vielleicht auch für 
diese Liste interessant.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

        Gerrit Gragert

-----Original Message-----
From: Terry Kuny [mailto:terry@xxxxxxx] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 4:04 AM
To: DIGLIB
Subject: [DIGLIB] Library of Congress plans world digital library

Library of Congress plans world digital library
22 Nov 2005  02:08 ET

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. Library of Congress is kicking off a 
campaign on Tuesday to work with other nation's libraries to build a World 
Digital Library, starting with a $3 million donation from Google Inc.

Librarian of Congress James Billington said he is looking to attract further 
private funding to develop bilingual projects, featuring millions of unique 
objects, with libraries in China, India, the Muslim world and other nations.

This builds on major existing digital documentary projects by the Library of 
Congress -- one preserving an online record of Americana and another 
documenting ties between the United States and Brazil, France, the Netherlands, 
Russia and Spain.

"The World Digital Library is an attempt to go beyond Europe and the 
Americas...into cultures where the majority of the world is," 
Billington told Reuters in a telephone interview.

As an example, Billington said the Library of Congress is in discussions with 
the national library of Egypt to include a collection of great Islamic 
scientific works from the 10th through the 16th Century in the World Digital 
Library.

"We are trying to do a documentary record of other great cultures of the world. 
How much we will be able to do will depend on how many additional partners we 
attract," he said.
Over the past decade, the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress 
has digitized more than ten million items to create a documentary record of 
Americana. A link is located at: 
http://www.loc.gov/memory/.

These include manuscripts, maps, audiovisual recordings, cartoons, caricatures, 
posters, documentary photographs, music, and, to a lesser extent, historic 
books. The World Digital Library would draw on a similar variety of multimedia 
objects.

A second project, known as the Global Gateway and introduced in 2000, involves 
collaborations with five national libraries in Europe and Brazil that focus on 
documenting ties between each of those countries and U.S. culture.

(http://international.loc.gov/intldl/find/digital_collaborations.html/)

GLOBAL CULTURES
By contrast, the World Digital Library will focus on creating records of global 
cultures. The Library of Congress will contribute its own body of works to a 
blended collection with other countries. More than half of the printed volumes 
in the Library of Congress are in languages other than English.

"It will deal with the culture of those people rather than with our contacts as 
Americans with those cultures," Billington said.

Web search company Google has agreed to work with the Library of Congress on 
developing standards for indexing the digital collections and by providing 
computer equipment.

The Library of Congress push adds momentum to a variety of competing projects 
by leading Internet companies and some of the world's greatest libraries to 
make available online a range of historic literature, audio recordings and film 
archives.

The plans unveiled over the past year mark the most sustained drive yet to make 
good on the vision of Internet pioneers to open the world's library collections 
to a global online audience. The dream suffered from a lack of funding and the 
distractions of the dot-com era's get-rick-quick schemes.

Among these are a major push by Google with five major academic libraries to 
digitize their book collections.

Meanwhile, the Open Content Alliance, backed by Yahoo Inc. , Microsoft Corp. , 
the non-profit Internet Archive and other major libraries, is looking to create 
an online clearinghouse for historic books, audio and films.

The Google Print project has been met with lawsuits by the New York-based 
Authors Guild and five U.S. publishers who are seeking to block Google's plan 
to create an online card catalog of copyright works in the collections of its 
library partners.

(Editing by Anthony Barker. Tel: +1 415 677 3919;
eric.auchard@xxxxxxxxxxx)