Posts tagged ‘historical archive’
The greatest library in the world
… to be.
Officially launched by UNESCO and partners, The World Digital Library extended its prototype life to the big time on Tuesday.
The WDL aims to provide, on its website, free access to cultural treasures from around the world including but not limited to manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings.
Items on the WDL may be browsed by place, time, topic, type of item, and contributing institution. Site navigation tools and content descriptions are provided in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish, with many more languages represented in the actual holding items.
The WDL was proposed by US Librarian of Congress, Jame Billington.
Other main digital libraries (at this time) are Google Books and The Europeana.
Europeana
A massive cross-border archive for Europe, sponsored by the EC, arrives today.
EUROPEANA – the European digital library, museum and archive – is a prototype website giving users direct access to some 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers and archival papers.
The digital content will be selected from that which is already digitised and available in Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. The prototype aims to have representative content from all four of these cultural heritage domains, and also to have a broad range of content from across Europe.
The interface will be multilingual. Initially, this may mean that it is available in French, English and German, but the intention is to develop the number of languages available following the launch.
Oh, the rich pickings!
