Library of Congress Advances 2 Digital Projects Abroad - New York Times:
October 18, 2007 Library of Congress Advances 2 Digital Projects Abroad By DOREEN CARVAJALPARIS, Oct. 17 — The Library of Congress announced an ambitious plan on Wednesday to digitize a collection of the world’s rare cultural materials — artifacts ranging from a photo collection of a 19th-century Brazilian empress to a crackly recording of the 101-year-old grandson of a slave.
The library also signed an agreement with Unesco in Paris to move ahead with the World Digital Library project, which is in the testing phase and will not be available for public use until next year.
Other national libraries appear poised to cooperate in the venture, which is modeled after the Library of Congress’s vast American Memory project that has posted millions of original items on the Web, including Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
“The vision is simply that this is a means for promoting far better intercultural understanding in the world,” said James Billington, the librarian of Congress for more than 20 years and the driving force behind the project, which aims to overcome the digital divide in developing countries by offering the collection free online.
The World Digital Library is proceeding as European libraries develop their own digital collections. The European Digital Library will release its prototype next year, and is a response to Google’s efforts to digitize libraries in the United States and Britain.
The French National Library has already developed a test project, Europeana, for the European library and is in the process of digitizing 300,000 books. Bruno Racine, the president of the French library, said there was no competition between that project and the World Digital Library.
“The multilingual dimension seems to be a very ambitious challenge, and if we can contribute usefully, we will be happy to do so,” Mr. Racine said of the World Digital Library.
The world library started two years ago with a $3 million grant from Google and technical assistance by Apple. Initially, five other libraries contributed material for the prototype, including the national libraries of Egypt, Brazil and Russia.
The digital library is searchable in seven languages, with video commentaries from curators alongside material including original maps, manuscripts, photographs and recordings.
The aim is that the material will ultimately be available on personal computers, hand-held devices and some of the basic, inexpensive laptops that are being developed for use in emerging economies.
When library officials displayed their new handiwork, though, the high technology was overshadowed by the ancient treasures it could show off: an elaborate 17th century map of the world with California depicted as a sliced-off island; a 1903 Thomas Edison film of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island; and a 17th century Arabic manuscript on the fundamentals of geometry.
“My name is Fountain Hughes,” declared a firm Southern voice in one of the recordings posted on the site dating to the 1940s. “My grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson. My grandfather was 115 years old when he died. And now I am 101 years old.”
The project’s organizers, according to Laura Campbell, an associate librarian at the Library of Congress, are working to raise money, discussing alliances with Nokia and the Vodafone Group and gathering commitments from countries to participate.
So there are a few interesting strains here. First, the Library of Congress is working in partnership with multiple libraries in other countries. Bravo. Second, it seems UNESCO is coordinating the project. This is interesting and could generate many complications when certain communities demand that their artifacts be presented in certain ways and under certain restrictions (or removed altogether). UNESCO has to abide by its own efforts to "defend" the integrity of "cultural properties," regardless of the public domain status of many materials.
And, please note, Google is helping to fund the project. Very interesting.
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Comments (1)
Of course a big corporation like Google is funding the project...it is the only way that an organization like UNESCO or the Library of Congress could get a project like this off the ground. Whether we like it or not, digitizing costs a great deal of money, and to digitize a collection as large as the American Collection at the LC takes a lot of money. Having a project funded by Google is different than having Google digitize a project. I'd like to take a closer look at what their project contract entailed.