UNESCO to launch digital library

UNESCO and 32 partner institutions will soon launch a free world digital library. The site will include manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, and prints and photographs.

The launch will take place at a reception co-hosted by UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura and US Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. Directors of the partner institutions will also be on hand to present the project to ambassadors, ministers, delegates, and special guests attending the semi-annual meeting of UNESCO’s Executive Board.

Media are invited to attend a pre-launch press conference, which will take place at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on April 21 at 11 a.m.

Billington first proposed the creation of a World Digital Library (WDL) to UNESCO in 2005, remarking that such a project could “have the salutary effect of bringing people together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking.”

In addition to promoting international understanding, the project aims to expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet, provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences, and narrow the digital divide within and between countries by building capacity in partner countries

The WDL will function in seven languages – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish – and include content in a great many other. Browse and search features will facilitate cross-cultural and cross-temporal exploration on the site

Descriptions of each item, and videos with expert curators speaking about selected items, will provide context for users, and are intended to spark curiosity and encourage both students and the general public to learn more about the cultural heritage of all countries.

The WDL was developed by a team at the Library of Congress. Technical assistance was provided by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina of Alexandria, Egypt.

Institutions contributing content and expertise to the WDL include national libraries and cultural and educational institutions in Brazil, Egypt, China, France, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Sweden, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States

Examples of treasures that will be featured on the WDL include oracle bones and steles contributed by the National Library of China; Arabic scientific manuscripts from the National Library and Archives of Egypt; early photographs of Latin America from the National Library of Brazil; the Hyakumanto darani, a publication from the year 764 from the National Diet Library of Japan; the famous 13th century “Devil’s Bible” from the National Library of Sweden; and works of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish calligraphy from the collections of the Library of Congress.

One of UNESCO’s main mandates is to promote the free flow of all forms of knowledge in education, science, culture, and communication

The organisation therefore supports initiatives to improve and increase content on the Internet. To this end, it collaborates with a range of partners on the creation of digital and other repositories.

The launch of the Human Rights Digital Library...

The launch of the Human Rights Digital Library, which took place on the 27 September 2006 in the National Academic Library in Astana.

The Bilingual Library is operational now and accessible via the following web address: http://hrc.nabrk.kz . The interfaces are available in Kazakh, Russian, French and English.The creation of the Digital library is a strong part the process of preparation of the National Human Rights Action Plan in the country and the result of the joint efforts of UNDP Human Rights Project, the Presidential Human Rights Commission, the UNESCO Cluster Office in Almaty and the Information Analysis Department of the Parliament of Kazakhstan, with the support of the National Academic Library of Kazakhstan.

The creation of the digital library is an innovative step forward in improving access to information and justice and providing human rights education for all through opening public information services. It should be especially stresses that it is the first experience in Central Asian countries.

The digital library has several important characteristics:

The digital library is created in Kazakh and Russian Languages in a user friendly version and provides free access for population to legal data base, containing more than 1000 legal documents mostly related to human rights issues.

The library has a particular focus on rural population and the vulnerable groups. Based on experience of the Human Rights Commission in handling complaints of the citizens, the documents in the part ¦how to¦ were systematized in 65 categories providing answers through the national legislation which law or provision is applicable if human rights are violated in this area. There are lawyers- comments answering to frequently asked questions.

The digital library serves as an effective awareness raising and educational tool on human rights.

The Greenstone Digital Library free software, provided by UNESCO allows getting access to the digital library on the Human Rights Commission-s website from any computer with access to internet or without such access that is very important that it works either on-line and off line. Information about product is available byhttp://www.greenstone.org.

The Digital Library of the Human Rights Commission will be disseminated over the territory of Kazakhstan through the extensive net of state libraries spread all over the country. These libraries are being equipped with computers and internet access and staff is going to be trained in program and will be able to provide support to those citizens with no or little IT skills. Thus, we make sure that the most vulnerable groups of the population, elderly and poorly educated people will benefit from the digital library.

The first training for the librarians out of 14 regional libraries of Kazakhstan has been conducted on the 25-26 September 2006 in the National Academic Library of Kazakhstan. The trainers were educated on the content dissemination, searching and consultation of readers on using of the digital library in the human rights protection.

The issue of sustainability of the digital library was discussed during the Launching event and at the meeting of the Human Rights Commission afterwards. The Recommendation of the meeting emphasizes that the Ministry of Information and culture will be responsible for disseminating the digital library via libraries network and Republican Center of legal information of the Ministry of Justice will support regular updating of the legal database contained in the library in Russian and Kazak languages.

Take a Trip to the World Digital Library

Although the World Digital Library is in its infancy, it provides an amazing look at library collections that may be half a world away.

For my first look into the WDL, I typed “Egypt” in the Search bar. This search introduced me to a large collection of observations and research of Egyptian society as described by Napolean Bonaparte’s French Commission on the Sciences and the Arts. When Napolean invaded Egypt, he asked this group of scholars to record all that they saw–including information about the country’s history, artifacts and architecture. Thanks to the World Digital Library, you too can now browse this publication page by page and from the comfort of home.

That’s not to say that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is out of my travel plans. Check out this aerial shot:

Digital Library Interoperability

Global Digital Library infrastructures resulting from the federation of regional, national and international interoperable DL systems and Digital Repositories will significantly advance cross-domain research through universal access to a broad spectrum of resources. However, making DL systems interoperable is a complex process that needs to take into consideration core requirements for DL architecture, content, functionality, policy, quality and user perspectives.
The DL.org Coordination Action addresses two important highly inter-related Digital Library aspects: laying the DL modelling foundations through the consolidation and enhancement of the DELOS DL Reference Model and Digital Library Interoperability.

UNESCO and US Library of Congress launch online World Digital Library

WASHINGTON (The International) — The site launched on the 21st of April 2009 was the brainchild of US Librarian of Congress Dr James H. Billington. It is hosted by the US Library of Congress and has been in development since 2006. Billington had hoped the site containing primary manuscripts and documents in their original language, would "promote intercultural dialogue and international understanding".

The World Digital Library supports one of the main mandates of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), to increase cultural and educational content available on the internet, and builds on a prior project called the Memory of the World Programme, intended to protect documents that would preserve the memory of global cultural heritages.

The World Digital Library (WDL)

The site contains digital formats of original books, journals, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, prints, photographs and sound recordings from all over the world representing every memberUNESCO country. Descriptions of the materials and the user tools are available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Users can choose to navigate the site using a time line starting from 8000 BC up to the present day, by topic of interest, or by selecting a particular region of the world.

Donated content for the project came from the US Library of Congress, UNESCO, National, University, and private libraries from around the world, and other institutes. Funding and development support totalling over $10 million dollars worth of investment, came from a range of companies and organisations including Google Inc, Microsoft Inc, and The Qatar Foundation.

Development of the project

Dr Billington was responsible for the "American Memory" National Digital Library (NDL) Program, which made around 11 million US historical materials freely available online. He approached UNESCOin 2005 with a proposal of the idea of creating a similar global online library.

In 2006, the US Library of Congress and UNESCO co-hosted a meeting at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters to start work on building a global network of experts and partners to allow the project to become a reality. The meeting’s objectives were met with a lot of support. Laura Bush the Honorary Ambassador for the UN Literacy Decade said, "making all this available free of charge on the Internet will give teachers and librarians a new resource to encourage young people to read and study foreign languages, and will advance learning both with and between countries".

UNESCO and the US Library of Congress signed the agreement to go ahead and work on the creation of the WDL in 2007. Under the agreement efforts would be made also to assist developing nation’s libraries in gaining the technology needed to enable them to contribute to the project.

Global praise for the WDL

UNESCO Director-General Koïchiro Matsuura said "UNESCO welcomes the creation of the World Digital Library which reflects the values and priorities of our Organization", and that it "offers an invaluable platform for the free flow of information, for international solidarity, for the celebration of cultural diversity and for the building of inclusive knowledge societies. With projects like the Digital Library, the cultural and societal potential of digital technologies come into their own."

Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, Chairperson of the Qatar Foundation, said that she was proud of Qatar’s involvement in the project and felt that "this endeavour will do much to develop the appreciation of other cultures and nations."

Digital library opens its doors in Seoul

Inside the Productivity Computer Cluster on the second floor, which is the core of the National Digital Library. Here, people can access 116 million pieces of digital content. By Jeon Min-kyu

Dibrary, which opened in Banpo-dong, southern Seoul late last month, makes libraries with books seem so, well, yesterday.

With booths where visitors can create their own digital content, surf the Web or browse the library’s ever-expanding collection of 116 million pieces of digitized material from around the world, Dibrary is a multimedia center providing access to all this and more with the click of a mouse.

Although “there are other digital libraries in other countries, such as the Europeana, most of them only exist online,” said Mo Chul-min, the library’s director.

These days, traditional libraries with real books generally have a digital component, but few are entirely devoted to digitized content, he said.

Dibrary, a portmanteau of “digital” and “library,” sits next to the National Library of Korea, from which it draws much of its source material. A virtual network connects the two and provides access to materials at other libraries nationwide. The library’s aim is to serve as a repository for the growing amount of digital content and provide the public with access to these resources.

The plan to create an integrated library network was hatched in 2000 by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and construction of the building was completed last year. Since it opened on May 27, over 1,000 people have passed through its halls each day.

The building itself is a bit of a high-tech haven. Upon entering, visitors are greeted by dozens of screens equipped with sensors that respond to movement by flashing different images. Inside, the Global Lounge, NDL Arts Gallery and digital newsstands are just a few of the futuristic facilities on hand.

The Global Lounge has dozens of computers equipped with the Windows operating system running in English, Chinese, Japanese, French and Vietnamese, and a small number of television sets showing satellite television programs in Vietnamese, Tagalog, French and Thai. The NDL Arts Gallery displays digital art in a series of rotating exhibitions. And the digital newsstands are large touch-screen monitors on which visitors can read virtual newspapers.

People with portable computers can work in the Laptop Zone or at other stations around the library complex.

Amateur directors interested in creating and editing their own digital content can do so in special studios that are open to anyone; the final product is shown on screens throughout the library complex. Professionals can use the advanced media facilities, including a video and audio recording studio and digital editing zone.

But it’s not all play. The library offers eight small Digital Meeting Rooms that come outfitted with LCD monitors and beam projectors, as well as an e-board - a white board that sends the information written on it to anyone in the room via e-mail. The library also has larger conference rooms that come similarly equipped.

In an area called the Productivity Computer Cluster, 252 computers provide access to the library’s entire collection. It currently has over 380,000 e-books, with thousands more from the National Library’s collection to be added each year.

Though a large portion of that collection consists of materials in Korean, the library also provides access to digitized content from the many countries in its database.

“Rather than visiting Web sites in different countries, visitors can search and access the content at the Dibrary portal, saving time and effort,” said Ryu Eun-young, a librarian at the library’s information technology division.

For example, if a user is searching for an academic paper about global warming, the Dibrary portal provides access to hundreds of materials from libraries at universities including Cornell and Columbia in the United States, Cambridge and Oxford in Britain and Nagoya and Nagasaki in Japan. If the material is copyrighted, the full text can only be accessed from the library itself, though a search can be conducted from any place with an Internet connection. Materials in the public domain can be accessed from anywhere.

“There are only a few places in Korea where people can search for degree theses from foreign countries like China,” said Kim Mi-kyung, a graduate student majoring in Chinese literature at Inha University. “My school doesn’t have access so I came here.”

According to Ryu, Dibrary also has contracts with digital archives such as American Memory, the digital collection of the U.S. Library of Congress, Australia’s Arrow Discovery Service and Japan’s University of Tokyo Depository.

“I can access most of the books published in Korea online [at Dibrary],” said Kim Byeong-hyeon, a Kyung Hee University student majoring in oriental medicine.

And if after all that virtual searching, all you want to do is relax, there are four movie multiplexes, where small groups can watch movies on DVD from the library’s collection of over 250,000 titles. Solo visitors can sit at their own individual stations and watch movies in the Media Center.

Digital Library Pixs

CSI's digital library gives new meaning to distance learning

The College of Staten Island took a step into the future by officially opening its brand-new Digital Library Learning Lab -- with computer technology so state-of-the-art it allows students from as far away as South Africa and Shanghai to take a college class without ever setting foot on the Willowbrook campus. [full story]

Free education from home: The World Digital Library debuts

frugal citizens turn to them for free entertainment and free Web access. Despite this, in city after city, libraries are seeing their hours reduced in budget cutbacks.

Over the past few weeks, though, some of the world's greatest libraries have been expanding. They're just doing it online.

The grandest national archives of 19 countries, including Iraq and Saudi Arabia, have come together to create the World Digital Library, and when it was inaugurated in Paris on April 21, copies of some 1,200 priceless documents were placed online for anyone and everyone to reference. The site, which is funded by private and corporate donations (Microsoft and Google pitched in), is worth hours of absorption for any history nut: You can zoom in and move around on high-resolution images as quickly as if you're playing the world's geekiest video game.

The WDL is a joint effort between UNESCO and our own Library of Congress. AsTime magazine pointed out, it's a little on the skimpy side right now, but this $60 million effort is still in its infancy. There are still plenty of electrifying primary sources available to flick through on your own time, including Emancipation Proclamationand the journal of Ferdinand Magellan. There are also some pretty weird selections, like a 1972 recording of "Amazing Grace" played on bagpipes. Then again, there used to be lots of worthy films left off of our National Film Registry, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is still calling some pretty obvious selections to the podium. Give it time.

And give it thanks. We're not all Ph.D. scholars, and most of us don't have expense budgets or the credentials to travel to the world's great libraries to access the documents that made us who we are. As promising at the WDL is, it's still way behind what we deserve. We can watch the opening credits to every season of The Apprentice on YouTube, but if you want to see the Mercator maps for yourself, you're lucky to drum up a foggy JPG, or, as with the type of software used by the New York Public Library's Digital Gallery, zooming and panning is a jerky, tricky chore.

The WDL is by no means the widest umbrella, either. Other major national libraries have their own online libraries that haven't yet shared their goodies with this global effort. The British Library has one of the best, using the same video-reading technology is uses in its on-site museum. You can read Lewis Carroll's hand-decorated Alice's Adventures Under Ground, for example, Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, or The Lindisfarne Gospels, dating to 715 -- none of those files are viewable through the WDL. Similarly, Europeana is a joint venture between EU countries that aims to put some 10 million digitized items online by 2011.

In addition to its more primitive American Memory digitization project dating to the last decade, our Library of Congress is slowly progressing with its MyLOC online section, which features up-close, at-your-command exploration of some important documents, such as a draft of the Constitution. That one's really cool; you can ask your computer to slide a window over the original paper to translate the colonial text and editors' scrawl for you.

The democratization of education has been possible for generations, but for some reason, we're only able to take baby steps toward enlightenment and expanded perspective. Everyone's projects are thin on the ground and mostly separate, but for those who want a free education at home, with a little diligent browser bookmarking you can cobble together an armchair exploration of the world.
Source

Launch of Human Rights Digital Library in Kazakhstan

Last week saw the official launch of a digital library at the National Academic Library of the capital Astana providing access to a data base with over 1000 legal documents in Kazakh and Russian, most of them related to human rights issues.

The launch event was attended by Kazakhstan’s Secretary of State Oralbay Abdikarimov and Human Rights Commission Chairperson, Abdildin Zhabaikhan.

This achievement is the result of the joint efforts of the Presidential Human Rights Commission, the UNDO Human Rights project, the UNESCO Office in Almaty and the Information Analysis Department of the Parliament of Kazakhstan, along with the support of the National Academic Library of Kazakhstan. The Human Rights Digital Library is also part of the preparation of the National Human Rights Action Plan of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

Focusing on the rural population and the vulnerable groups, the library is an innovative step forward in improving access to information and justice and encompasses what UNESCO has been advocating as Knowledge Societies, which requires an empowering social vision of pluralism, inclusion and participation.

On that specific subject, Tarja Virtanen, Head of the UNESCO Office in Almaty said: “One criteria of success of a public information service in a Knowledge Society is its accessibility to all citizens of the county – citizens residing in villages and distant rural areas, beyond the capital and other large cities where internet access is commonplace – and to other vulnerable groups” which is the specific objective aimed by the library.

Another important aspect of this project is the use of Greenstone, a free and open source software, produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO, specifically for the Russian and Kazakh interface used in this digital library.

The Digital Library will be disseminated trough the net in the different state libraries all over the country.

UNESCO and US Library of Congress -- The World Digital Library

UNESCO and the US Library of Congress will join forces to build a World Digital Library, following the signing of an agreement by James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress and, Abdul Waheed Khan, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on 17 October 2007.

The World Digital Library initiative will digitize unique and rare materials from libraries and other cultural institutions around the world and make them available free of charge on the Internet. These materials include manuscripts, maps, books, musical scores, sound recordings, films, prints and photographs.

World Digital Library

United Nations has established the World Digital Library. We can see here rare - and sometimas aboriginal, for ex. the cave painting with bleeding antelope - manuscripts, books, films or maps from all over the world.

here are here other cave paintings, the first map, which mentions the name of America, or the “Sixth Map of Asia”. Besides this we can read the history of these documents too.

The website in seven languages - Arabic, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese - to read. The upload process of the curiosities is in progress, and constantly expanding.