SUBSCRIBE!
Home
Current Column
Archived Columns

by Teresa Martin

When my age was in the single digits, a trip to the library anchored my world. Every two weeks we would drive to that favorite place of mine, and I could take out six entire books. Being a bit greedy, I would often read all six in the first two days, and then count down the calendar until it was time to return for six more.

I loved libraries.

So of course lo those many years later I was in hog heaven the very second I discovered the Web, aka, the big library in the sky. It was my childhood dream come true. If I could have invented the World Wide Web at the age of 8, I would have! And this week things got even better with the launch of the World Digital Library (WDL), a project of the US Library of Congress and more than 30 other national and research libraries around the world.

The goal is to create a central repository that gathers together cultural heritage from all continents to a shared point of access. Scanned books, photos, maps ... presented in seven languages. Curious? Then check out http://www.wdl.org

It's a pretty neat way to move through history - clicking on scanned collections by geographic region, by timeline, by topic ... In mere seconds I was off and running. I looked at the second edition of Aesop's Fables, translated from Latin into German and illustrated with 208 woodcuts. And then at the 1764 watercolor map of the Dagua River in what is now Columbia. And the Yongle Encyclopedia, 11,095 volumes long (only some of which still exist), created in the early 1400s in China. I could go on and on because once I entered this world it was hard to leave.

You see, the maps and the scrolls and the books and the postcards all retain their form, but you interact with them digitally, scrolling seamlessly in and out and over (a scroll wheel mouse make the interface especially natural and intuitive). So I can see the spine of the book and the texture of the ancient pages. Sure, you aren't touching or turning them in person, but let's be real - with such rare and ancient objects, few of us would ever be allowed to see, let alone touch them in their delicate physical state even if we were somehow to travel to libraries around the world.

And each item has a detail page (also know as metadata about the item), that explains what it is, why it matters, where it is ... and offers up links to related items in the collection as well, much as a good librarian would do. In some cases you even get a video of that librarian taking about the item. The detail pages are available in your choice of seven languages.

It is no small task to create a space for exploring vast quantities of information and one of the wonderful things about the World Digital Library is the way each document is cross-referenced, as well as the navigational construct around the collection. Say you are exploring a 1700s map ... well, you can easily follow a path along the axis of time, place, topic, and collection location to see other maps of Brazil or other maps of the 1700s, or more about the history of South America, or what other objects the National Library of Brazil has in the World Digital Library. Did I mention this all feels very smooth and easy to navigate through as well?

About 10 years ago, the Library of Congress unveiled the American Memory project (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html), an effort to digitize and make publicly available a variety of documents that told "our" story. The online collection has now reached 11 million items. In June 2005, U.S. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington proposed the establishment of the World Digital Library in a speech to the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO. The effort dovetails with UNESCO's World Memory project whose goal is to help counter what it calls our "collective amnesia" of our own history.

The World Digital Library is only small collection ... so far. But as with all things, it will continue to grow over time. Its ongoing strength lies in its global - both in time and space - perspective, on the collaboration it takes to make it work, and on its openness and availability. And, it makes our human history very real. It might even help inspire a passion or two for the stories that have made us, well, us.

There's a three key words in that last paragraph I want to say again: global and collaborative and available. The thing I always loved about libraries was not only that wonderful books lived within - but also that those very books were available ... to me. And that they were from all over, representing life beyond one tiny corner of the world and one millisecond in time. But the best was that there were people in the library who pointed the way to these pieces and showed me that finding information was a shared and ongoing process.

That, too, is the heart of the Internet. Sometimes we get bedazzled by e-commerce and movies on demand and profit-as-the-sole-motivator, but the point of the web is to let us be collaborative with each other in a myriad of ways. The limitations of geography and time are lifted, and we can both create and share for as many reasons as there are minds.

Through this incredible online space of WDL, we take down the boundaries of town, state, country, and continent and create a digital library that celebrates the unique pieces of the world and through the aggregated whole, our common stories of humanity and history.

Oh, and let's not forget it is pretty darn cool to look at a page of script written in the 13th century and feel the faint motion of the ghost hand who put ink to paper in a far off time and place and to hear the faint whisper of a voice carried through the ages in the digital ether.