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Azerbaijan will not join World Digital Library yet

09 April 2009 15:10 (UTC +04:00)

Baku. Aynur Veliyeva â€“ APA-Economics. The United Nations’ cultural body Unesco is to launch a World Digital Library later this month, a website that features unique contributions from archives around the globe.

The site, which will be launched on April 21 at the body’s Paris headquarters, will include a wealth of manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, and prints and photographs, all available free to the public, browseable and searchable in seven languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish) but with content offerings in â€œdozens of languages.â€
The public will be able to draw on all of the material featured free of charge.
The stunning contents of World Digital Library include relatively modern contributions such as the early films of France’s Lumiere brothers, stretching back to ancient texts and artworks.
The trend of digitising art and cultural collections is growing across the world, making it more straightforward for the organisers of the new Unesco project to draw on material from collections in diverse parts of the globe.
French, Brazilian, Swiss, Russian and other countriesâ€™ national libraries will also join the project.
Azerbaijanâ€™s National Library said its connection to the system is impossible now because digitalization has not been completed.
The WDL was first proposed by Billington at a UNESCO meeting in 2005 as an effort to â€œbring people together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking.â€

Within a year of Billingtonâ€™s vision, the WDL had an agreement, the planning process underwritten with â€œa giftâ€ from Google, and by 2007, a prototype was ready, created through â€œa consultative processâ€ between UNESCO and IFLA (the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions).