Plans for world digital library unveiled

The plan is to digitize the world’s knowledge and
offer it free on the Internet.

WASHINGTON POST

PARIS — As ideas go, they don’t come much bigger: Digitize the accumulated wisdom of humankind, catalogue it, and offer it for free on the Internet in seven languages.

The first phase of that simple yet outlandishly ambitious dream is about a year away from being realized, according to a group of international librarians, computer technicians and U.N. officials who unveiled a prototype for the project, called the World Digital Library, in Paris on Wednesday.

Its creators see it as the ultimate multilingual, multicultural tool for researching and retrieving information about knowledge and creativity from any era or place. The WDL Web site (www.worlddigitallibrary.org) will provide access to original documents, films, maps, photographs, manuscripts, musical scores and recordings, architectural drawings and other primary resources through a variety of search methods.

“The capacity to search in the various ways that will be possible in the World Digital Library will promote all kinds of cross-cultural perspectives and understanding,” said James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who proposed the project two years ago. The ability to cross-reference information pulled from “the deep memories” of cultures is “an exciting frontier possibility for the world,” he said in an interview.

“In essence, what they are doing is building an intellectual cathedral, and it may never get finished,” said Paul Saffo, a longtime Silicon Valley technology forecaster. “But this is a good effort even if it fails, because it is going to inspire a lot of other efforts, and if it succeeds, it will be a wonderful resource.”

“The challenges here aren’t technological,” Saffo said. Financial hurdles might be considerable, and the project could be criticized as too grandiose, or its model might be considered too closed. But all those problems will probably be resolved, he said. “For me, the issue is the will to make it happen. The people involved in this — will they really see this through?”

With entrenched interests starting to gain control of the Internet, he added, “it seems like the right thing at the right time, and the most important thing is that we try to do it.”

The prototype introduced Wednesday allowed searches by time, geographical location, topic and format, with the ability to narrow results by limiting them to books, photographs, movies or recordings. For written materials, the same content was simultaneously available in seven languages.