Webupon

n 2005, James Billington, the director of the Library of Congress (the largest assembly of printed materials in the world) proposed to create a digital library, whose contents would be accessible to all people in the Internet. Billington’s initiative was supported by national libraries of many countries (from Egypt to Brazil), the corporations of Google and Microsoft, and private investors. April 21 the first version will be launched in beta-regime.

James Billington is a historian-Russian philologist that has consulted many administrations of American presidents and one of the most respected people in the world of libraries. With his efforts, in 1994, a colossal education program “National Digital Library Program” (later renamed into “American Memory”) was started. By 2009 over 9 million documents: photos, books, maps, audiorecordings connected to the U.S. history have become available to any Internet user.

“American Memory” isn’t the only successfully working before 2005 project. By then, the archival portals of UNESCO, the project “OAIster” of the Michigan University already existed, and “Google Book Search” was founded. One after another, national digital libraries started to emerge in Europe and Latin America (for example, the “Biblioteca Digital Iberoamericana y Caribena”). But according to Billington, all these great projects had fundamental flaws. First, too few materials were digitalized. Second, the ones available are presented in so many different types (not talking about the different languages) that they are hard to find and use. Finally, digital libraries aren’t connected to each other, by which they make the lives of the common user harder.

Billington proposed to create a united, world digital library, and formulated its 5 goals: the stimulation of international and intercultural understanding, stimulation to learn new languages, help to pedagogues, help to science researchers, and the increase of non-English and non-Western content in the Internet.

Many people responded to the call of the director of the Library of Congress, and already in the draft version the scale of the project is larger than expected. It was planned that the library would be in the 6 official languages of the UN, but almost immediately a seventh appeared: Portuguese, as the National Library of Brazil decided to join. By 2009 there are 32 members in the World digital library.

While the World Library was preparing for its opening, one of its competitors, the project “Europeana” launched. Its start will be remembered because the site crashed only a couple of hours after the opening because of the inflow of users. The reconstruction of the project took a month, and it is still working in a test mode.

How the World digital library works is still unclear. Its presentation looks amazingly utopian: the viewer is showed a page from the “Historical background of the 1st Regiment Nerchinsk Zabaikalsky Cossack troops”. Then the page is turned, enlarging the pictures, and then translated into Korean. But it feels too good to be the truth. We will have to see what it really looks like: there are still several days until it will be opened to the pubic.