Librarian of Congress James H. Billington and Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein announced this week that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will become a founding partner in the World Digital Library (WDL). Launched in 2005 by the Library of Congress in cooperation with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the WDL will make a wealth of primary materials from countries and cultures around the world freely available on the Internet.
Weinstein said NARA will contribute digital versions of documents from its collections to the WDL, which is slated to launch for the international public in early 2009. Documents will include the Declaration of Independence; the Constitution of the United States; the Bill of Rights; the Emancipation Proclamation; as well as an array of Civil War photographs; naturalization and immigration records of famous Americans; and photographs by Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Lewis Hine. The images NARA has contributed to the WDL, meanwhile are already available on the NARA web site. In addition to NARA and the Library of Congress, WDL project partners include cultural institutions and libraries from Brazil, China, Egypt, Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and many other countries.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 7/16/2008 01:56:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
