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Google Donates $3 Million to Library of Congress for "World Digital Library"

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on November 22, 2005 - 11:17am.
Washington - The U.S. Library of Congress announced on Tuesday that it has received a $3 million gift from Google, earmarked for the development of a World Digital Library that will digitize and make available online works from the U.S. and around the world. The Library of Congress recently collaborated with Google on the digitization of about 5,000 books in the public domain. The public-private World Digital Library project aims to index and make available to libraries, content owners and their supporters "rare and unique cultural materials held in U.S. and Western repositories with those of other great cultures such as those that lie beyond Europe and involve more than 1 billion people: Chinese East Asia, Indian South Asia and the worlds of Islam stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Asia to Africa," said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington. "We're trying to recreate the memory of cultures that have much longer memories than we do," Billington told The New York Times.
tags: Google | Library | World Digital Library | Donates |