World Digital Library opens at UNESCO's Paris Headquarters 2 Washington

UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,
has started small, with about 1,200 documents and their explanations
from scholars in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese,
Spanish and Russian. But it is designed to accommodate an unlimited
number of such texts, charts and illustrations from as many countries
and libraries as want to contribute.


The main target is children, he added, building on the success among
young people of the U.S. National Digital Library Program, which has
been in operation at the Library of Congress since the mid-1990s.


The site was developed by a team at the Library of Congress in
Washington with technical assistance from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina
in Egypt. The digital library's main server is also in Washington,
but officials said plans are underway for regional servers around the
world.


Development costs of more than $10 million were financed by private
donors, including Google, Microsoft, the Qatar Foundation, King
Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia and the Carnegie Corporation of
New York, the newspaper reported.


By comparison, the American Memory project cost about $60 million,
suggesting that more funds will have to be raised as the World
Digital Library expands.

--SPA