- NY Times, Tuesday, November 22, 2005 11:02 AM
With a $3 million donation from Google, the Library of Congress today announced plans to build what it calls the World Digital Library, a project that aims to digitize primary materials from national
and international libraries. One of the first undertakings will be digitizing documents of Islamic science from the 10th Century from the National Library of Egypt. After that the Library of Congress
hopes to make available online materials from the National Libraries of China, East Asia, India, South Asia, and the rest of the Islamic world. As
The New York Times points out, the Library of
Congress is very short on the necessary funds for completing this ambitious project, and, as in the past, has turned to the private sector for funding. Google's donation, which is actually rather
small considering the scope of the project, is supposed to help lay the initial groundwork. This project has nothing to do with Google's Book Search project, which is currently embroiled in a series
of lawsuits with disgruntled authors and publishers over alleged copyright infringement. The World Digital Library is a similar project to the American Memory Project, launched by the Library of
Congress in 1994, that made available online the famous manuscripts and other materials from political figures like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.
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