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CIL2007: The World Digital Library Initative (Wednesday keynote)

John Van Oudenaren, Senior Advisor, World Digital Library, Library of Congress (jvou@loc.gov)

  • Vision
    • Digital library of mostly original materials from cultures from around the world & to make it available
  • Objectives
    • promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness
    • provide a resource for educators that matches the needs of a global digital world
    • acquire rare and unique content of interest to scholars and the general public
  • Existing projects
    • American Memory
    • Bilateral projects w/ other countries
  • Partners
    • UNESCO
    • National libraries and other cultural institutions
      • Bibliotecha Alexandrea
      • Nat Lib of Egypt
      • Nat Lib of Brazil
      • Russian State Librart
      • National Library of Russia
      • Others
    • Tech community
      • Google
      • Yahoo
      • Apple
      • Standford university
  • Dates & Milestones
    • June 2005: WDL Proposed
    • November 2005: Google gives $3 for project planning
    • 2006: agreements w/ partner institutions
    • December 2006: site mockup and proposal to UNESCO
    • 2007: Agreement with UNESCO
    • October 2007: WDL Prototype unveiled at UNESCO
    • September 2008: Planned full-scale launch
  • Implementation
    • Not just a big Web site
    • three pillars
      • content acquisition
      • construction of a sustainable network for production and distribution of content
      • the site: www.worlddigitallibrary.org
  • Content Acquisition
    • work w/ partners to digitize content in places where little or no scanning is being done
    • bring to light the hidden treasures
    • maintain and build upon existing scanning operations
      • Cairo
      • Rio
      • Moscow
      • St. Petersburg
      • mobile scanning team in Siberia
    • establish additional operations
    • pursue additional methods of acquisition
  • Construction of network
    • both as technical infrastructure and a community of institutions, scholars, curators, linguists and technologists
    • Nodes
      • digitization
      • cataloging
      • translation
      • editorial
      • distribution
      • central sites & mirrored sites
  • The Web Site
    • prototype under development
    • multilingual
    • high quality user experience
    • ability to search and browse
    • multi-format
      • manuscripts
      • maps
      • photos
      • rare books
      • sound & video
      • 3-D representations
    • special features
    • educational content
    • social networking features
    • adjustments to developing country conditions (i.e. low bandwidth & mobile devices)

Published by Michael Sauers

Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.

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