A globe-spanning U. N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on the Internet, serving up mankind’s accumulated knowledge in seven languages for students around the world.
James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress who launched the project four years ago, said the ambition was to make available on an easy-to-navigate site, free for scholars and other curious people anywhere, a collection of primary documents and authoritative explanations from the planet’s leading libraries.
The site (www.wdl.org) has put up the Japanese work that is considered the first novel in history, for instance, along with the Aztecs’ first mention of the Christ child in the New World and the works of ancient Arab scholars piercing the mysteries of algebra(代数), each entry flanked by learned commentary. "There are many one-of-a-kind documents," Billington said in an interview.
The World Digital Library, which officially will be inaugurated (落成典礼) recently at the Paris headquarters of 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, 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. That program, at its American Memory site, has made available 15 million U.S. historical records, including recorded interviews with former slaves, the first moving pictures and the Declaration of Independence. Billington predicted that children around the world, like their U. S. counterparts, will turn naturally to the Internet for answers to questions, provided they have access to computers and high-speed connections.
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.
In addition to UNESCO and the Library of Congress, 26 other libraries and institutions in 19 countries have contributed to the project. Each is accompanied by a brief explanation of its content and significance. The documents have been scanned onto the site directly, in their original languages, but the explanations appear in all seven of the site’s official languages.
Users can sort through the information in several ways. They can ask what was going on anywhere in the world in, say, science or literature during the 4th century B.C., for instance. They can look up the history of a certain topic over the centuries in China alone, or in China and North America. By cross-referencing, a user can see how one area of the world stood compared with another at any given time.
Which of the following is true about the World Digital Library according to the passage