UN World Digital Library
I saw a story on Slashdot yesterday that linked to BBC coverage of the United Nations’ World Digital Library project. I checked it out and it looks pretty cool. In my brief browsing of the site I didn’t find anything that jumped out as “must look at” but I would have loved to have resources like this when I was in school taking world history classes and having to write papers.
The Internet is a great platform for commerce, entertainment, and communications but I’m glad that we haven’t lost the early intent to make scholarly resources available to anyone in the world. I’m a huge fan of online library projects and while I don’t spend a lot of time browsing online libraries I love that so many primary source documents from the world’s great libraries have been made available, often for free, to any interested party.
That’s a wonderful democratization of information.