The Washington Post showcases an amazingly visionary project, the World Digital Library, which plans to digitize the accumulated wisdom of humankind, catalogue it, and offer it for free on the Internet in seven languages:
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.
They don’t come more visionary than this one…
[via Jon]
2 responses so far ↓
Tom // 18 October 2007 at 9:12 pm |
As usual, Borges is the real visionary http://www.literatura.us/borges/biblioteca.html
Jon // 22 October 2007 at 12:13 am |
He is, but not in this case: Borges’s library is often credited with prefiguring hypertext but is really a metaphor for the (in)finity of God. The WDL is effectively a library of Babel that has been validated by experts, with all the ‘babel’ expunged.