Google Funding $3 Million LC World Digital Library

-- Library Journal, 11/28/2005

Google has given the Library of Congress (LC) $3 million to fund the facility's World Digital Library, a project to mount primary materials from libraries and museums for public use on the Internet. Librarian of Congress James Billington said the World Digital Library will be reminiscent of LC's current American Memory Project, which offers electronic access to historical artifacts such as the papers of Lincoln and Jefferson, the Gettysburg Address, and Civil War photos. LC said that it has cut a deal with the National Library of Egypt for "digitizing documents of Islamic science from the tenth century," and Billington added that he hopes also to get materials from China, East Asia, India, South Asia, "and the Islamic world, stretching from Indonesia to Africa." Said Billington, "We're trying to recreate the memory of cultures that have much longer memories than we do. The whole point is to get a world digital library that will bring, free of charge to anyone with Internet access, a series of web sites that will seamlessly integrate materials of different cultures as much as possible."