The Multilingual World Digital Library
In another example of how Universities, Museums, and Libraries are embracing the web, the World Digital Library enters the scene to provide the world with access to free access to books and other learning multimedia.
From the Library’s website:
The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.
A new addition to the World Digital Library will be from a recent partnership between London’s Wellcome Library and Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA).
Together they aim to help reveal the history of medicine in the Eastern world and to provide world wide access to rare materials for the first time.
Frances Norton, Head of the Wellcome Library, said: “Our unique partnership will demonstrate how non-English language digital resources can engage local audiences and experts, deepening our understanding of the materials available here in the UK and making them globally searchable in languages other than English.”
Internet users will have easy access to a diverse collection of rare materials relating to Ancient and Modern Egypt, from papyri to Arabic medical manuscripts and even relics of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1789.
Ismail Serageldin, Director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina, said: “Without question, the Wellcome Library is one of the most important repositories of treasures relating to the history of medicine in the world.”
“For us, this partnership is a major step forward in our vision to make all knowledge available to all. The project will enable manuscripts that are spread in different parts of the world to be virtually re-assembled into a complete manuscript.”
“We have the possibility to make this material available to a new generation of scholars, who have been brought up with the Internet, on Facebook and YouTube, who will be able to find the treasures of the past, in the forms of the present and the future.”
Read the full story
Read more about the World Digital Library at their website.
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