Friends: The Library of Congress in Washington DC has taken the first step to create the World Digital Library. I give below two news items from Peter Suber's blog "Open Access News". Brewster Kahle is forging ahead with the Internet Archive. Carnegie-Mellon University and their partners in India (led by Balki of IISc) and China are moving forward with their Million Books Digital Library project. Google, Yahoo and MSN are involved in huge digitization projects. The potential of the new web technology is being realised at last. Led by MIT, Cambridge, many universities around the world (particularly in China and Japan, but not yet in India) are placing their course material in the public domain under the Open Course Ware programme. Many journals have embraced the open access model and more than 500 institutions have set up interoperable institutional open access archives. Institutions such as UNESCO, ICSU, and CODATA have come out strongly in favour of open access to information and data. Donor agencies such as the Wellcome Trust now insist that results of publicly funded research should be available via open access channels. These are excellent developments. Experts such as Stevan Harnad, Alma Swan, Peter Suber and Leslie Chan and legal luminaries such as Lawrence Lessig have written extensively about the great advantages of going OA. One wonders why many universities and research laboratories in the developing world are still not embracing the culture of open access. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] ---- OA World Digital Library David A. Vise, World Digital Library Planned, Washington Post, November 22, 2005. Excerpt: The Library of Congress is launching a campaign today to create the World Digital Library, an online collection of rare books, manuscripts, maps, posters, stamps and other materials from its holdings and those of other national libraries that would be freely accessible for viewing by anyone, anywhere with Internet access. This is the most ambitious international effort ever undertaken to put precious items of artistic, historical, and literary significance on the Internet so that people can learn about other cultures without traveling further than the nearest computer, according to James H. Billington, head of the Library of Congress. Billington said his goal is to bring together materials from the United States and Europe with precious items from Islamic nations stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Africa, as well as important materials from collections in East and South Asia....Billington said he envisions the initiative as a public-private partnership. Yesterday, he said that the Library of Congress has accepted $3 million from Google Inc. as its first corporate contribution....During the past year, Google has digitized about 5,000 books from the Library of Congress as part of a pilot project to refine the techniques to make copies of fragile books without damaging them. In the next phase of the project, Billington said Google will digitize books and other materials from the Library of Congress Law Library....Brin and Billington said Google would only digitize materials from the Library of Congress that are in the public domain and therefore not subject to copyright protection. Brin said he will help raise additional private funds to finance the World Digital Library. Billington said the $3 million gift from Google will be used over the next few years to develop the details of the project and pay for global outreach. ---- LOC-Google press release on World Digital Library The Library of Congress and Google have issued a joint press release on the World Digital Library (November 22). Excerpt: Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin announced today that Google is the first private-sector company to contribute to the Library's initiative to develop a plan to begin building a World Digital Library (WDL) for use by other libraries around the globe. The effort would be supported by funds from nonexclusive, public and private partnerships, of which Google is the first. The concept for the WDL came from a speech that Billington delivered to the newly established U.S. National Commission for UNESCO on June 6, 2005, at Georgetown University....In his speech, Billington proposed that public research institutions and libraries work with private funders to begin digitizing significant primary materials of different cultures from institutions across the globe. Billington said that the World Digital Library would bring together online 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. Google Inc. has agreed to donate $3 million as the first partner in this public-private initiative. Google Co-Founder and President of Technology Sergey Brin said, Google supports the World Digital Library because we share a common mission of making the world's information universally accessible and useful. To create a global digital library is a historic opportunity, and we support the Library of Congress in this effort....The content of the World Digital Library, like that of American Memory, will be primarily one-of-a-kind materials, including manuscript and multimedia materials of the particular culture....The Library and Google recently completed a yearlong cooperative digitization of about 5,000 books in the public domain. The pilot developed procedures for handling and tracking fragile material as well as developing specifications for high-quality scanned images. Google will continue its scanning efforts by digitizing works of historical value from the Library of Congress' Law Library. In making the announcement, Billington emphasized the little-known fact that more than one-half of the book collections of the Library of Congress are in languages other than English. Like the materials in American Memory, those in the World Digital Library will either be in the public domain or made available with special permission. A World Digital Library would make these collections available free of charge to anyone accessing the Internet, and it could well have the salutary effect of bringing people together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking, said Billington. We are grateful for Google's contribution to this important initiative, and we will seek contributions from other private sector companies with an equally enlightened self-interest.