Opening Remarks to the UNESCO-Library of Congress Experts Meeting on the World Digital Library
Paris, November 30, 2006
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington
Your excellencies, distinguished colleagues, friends, thank you for coming to this conference, especially those of you who have traveled long distances to get here. Ambassador Oliver, thank you for that introduction, and for hosting this event in this historic place. And thank you, Assistant Director General Khan, for your support. We are grateful to UNESCO, the U.S. Mission to UNESCO, and the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO for working with us in organizing this event.
Our purpose, this evening and tomorrow, is to discuss plans to build a World Digital Library, working with UNESCO, its member states, and cultural institutions from around the world. I look forward to exchanging views with all of you on what this initiative should accomplish, and how it best can be carried out.
In this opening session, I am going to outline for you my own vision for a World Digital Library, not with the expectation that the Library of Congress or I myself have answers to all the questions that a project of this complexity raises, but as a way of kicking off the discussion and inspiring you to think about the same questions as well as raise new ones that you might have.
The basic vision is straightforward. As I said my speech last year to the U.S. National Commission in which I first proposed this idea, the goal is to create an online encyclopedia, freely available over the Internet, of important and interesting cultural objects from the world’s countries and civilizations. These works will reside in a large, online repository that can be searched and used in different ways by teachers, librarians, scholars, and the general public.
In addition to the repository, the World Digital Library should have special sections, developed by scholars and curators, that present the “memory” of countries and civilizations by selecting the most important of these cultural objects, placing them in their historical context for a general audience.
In putting forward this vision for a World Digital Library, I had in mind the experience of the Library of Congress in developing bilateral, bilingual digital library projects, beginning with Russia in 1999 and continuing with partners in Brazil, Egypt, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. I am grateful to our partner institutions in these countries, all of which are represented at this conference, for the work that we have accomplished together. I look forward to working with them – as well as with many other new partners – in determining how we can take the experience and knowledge gained in building a series of bilateral, bilingual projects into a genuine multilateral, multilingual effort to display important cultural materials in all languages and from all countries, especially emphasizing cultural diversity and bringing developing countries to the forefront.
The proposed World Digital Library is not intended to replace or compete with the many planned or existing national and regional digital library projects. Such projects are important for helping countries and regions to establish or strengthen their identities, for building regional cooperation, and for meeting the needs of teachers and scholars from those regions and countries.
I envision that the World Digital Library, whatever form it ultimately takes, will work with these projects, support them to the degree that it is able, and exploit as many synergies and complementarities with them as possible.
At the same time, however, I do not believe that a World Digital Library can be the mere mechanical aggregation of the various national and regional parts. As a historian, I know that “world history” is not just the sum of our separate national and regional histories. Rather, it is a sub-discipline in its own right, focused on offering comparative, cross-national, and cross-cultural perspectives – at its best helping people ask the big questions about what civilizations share in common and what makes them distinctive. In much the same way, a World Digital Library has to offer intellectual and cultural value going beyond that provided by the individual national and regional projects.
The World Digital Library – both the digital library itself and the cooperation among scholars, librarians, and curators from around the world that will be needed to create this digital library – has the potential to accomplish many worthwhile objectives.
I will cite three in particular.
First, a World Digital Library will promote inter-cultural dialogue and international understanding. Because the Internet is by definition international and because the primary documents of culture have a special human appeal that transcends politics, a well-organized and appropriately presented collection of such documents offers an enormous potential for increasing trans-cultural understanding, especially through the impact it can have on curious and multi-medially oriented young people.
A second and related objective of the World Digital Library will be to increase the volume of freely available, high-quality content on the Internet, particularly in languages other than English. In this way, the World Digital Library will help to increase linguistic and cultural diversity and contribute to UNESCO’s goal of building knowledge societies.
The Library of Congress already has a track record in this area. In our bilateral projects, we have worked with partners to increase their capacity to scan materials in Russian, Portuguese, Arabic, and other languages. Much more needs to be done, however, both in terms of extending digitization and content-creation to other countries and languages, and in improving multilingual searching and display capabilities so that our sites are equally accessible to audiences using many different languages.
A third objective that the World Digital Library will promote is capacity building in developing countries. The Library of Congress is not a development assistance agency, so let me be clear: I am not proposing that we get into the development assistance business for its own sake. We have no mandate from our own Congress to do this. What I am saying, however, is that creating a World Digital Library of cultural heritage content will be such a highly ambitious task that it will require the skills and knowledge of people around the world. We in the developed world library and cultural community will have to assist in building capacity in the developing countries, not as an act of charity, but because without such capacity we will not be able to accomplish a venture of this magnitude and complexity. We will cut ourselves off from digital access to the cultures and civilizations representing the majority of the world’s peoples in a way that not only will make us spiritually and intellectually poorer, but that in this age of globalization will undermine our ability to deal with the economic, political, and security challenges of the future. I will return to this point in a moment.
In the eighteen months since I first proposed the idea of a World Digital Library, reaction from around the world has been enthusiastic. Current and prospective partners have expressed interest in working on this project. Some of our partners – from Brazil, Egypt, and Russia – are already participating in the planning process and the development of the prototype site that we will preview tomorrow. We also have developed a close relationship with IFLA, whose incoming president, Claudia Lux, will serve as our conference chair tomorrow. I much appreciate these expressions of interest and support.
At the same time, however, many people around the world have questions about the World Digital Library that need to be answered as we go forward.
One of the questions that we hear most often concerns financing. Who is going to pay for all this? And, assuming that most of the funding will have to come from the private sector, what will this mean for the independence and quality of the project? Will the World Digital Library be commercialized or privatized? These questions were raised with particular urgency last November, when Sergei Brin, the co-founder of Google, Inc., and I jointly announced that Google was making the first gift to the proposed World Digital Library.
Like other national libraries, the Library of Congress is a government-supported institution. The Congress of the United States generously provides for our staff salaries, our buildings and other facilities, and our basic acquisitions of books, periodicals, and other materials. However, for special initiatives involving outreach and education, we rely on gifts from private individuals, foundations, and companies.
This has been the case with exhibits, fellowships, and publications, and it has become the norm for our digital library projects as well. American Memory, our flagship digital library project that began in 1994, was a $60 million effort to put online five million items from American history over a five year period. Congress provided 25 percent of the funding, or $15 million, but the other $45+ million came from private donors.
It is in this connection that we sought and received the gift from Google for the World Digital Library. The Google funding is a gift, and does not come with strings attached. We have been given the money to develop a plan and to demonstrate a prototype of the World Digital Library, both of which are to be made freely available to the public. It also is important to note that the World Digital Library will deal with rare and unique cultural objects. It has nothing to do with the mass book digitization projects that are being undertaken by various private companies and non-profit consortia, and it will not, because of its overwhelming focus on older materials, get involved in controversies over copyright and intellectual property.
As the project proceeds, we fully expect to receive additional gifts and grants from companies, foundations, and individuals who support the building of a World Digital Library. We hope that contributors in many countries will back this effort, either by contributing to the World Digital Library fund that the Library of Congress has established or, just as well, by giving directly to partner institutions in other countries who then can use this funding to participate in the World Digital Library. We fully expect to fund equipment and other costs in developing countries in order to enable them to take part in this effort.
Other questions that we frequently hear with regard to the World Digital Library concern issues of content selection, multilingualism, editorial interpretation, and management control. What will be the role of the Library of Congress in establishing the World Digital Library? Will the World Digital Library further increase the presence of English-language material on the Internet, or will it strengthen the position of other languages in cyberspace? Will it promote American or what are sometimes called "Anglo-Saxon" values, or will it be open to genuine diversity – cultural and linguistic?
We will be addressing many of these issues in detail in our sessions tomorrow.
In this setting, I would like to make just two general points in response to these questions. The first concerns the scope and ambition of the project. The second concerns the need for cooperation in carrying out such a project and ensuring that it is a gift of free and open knowledge to the world.
To be worthy of its name, the World Digital Library has to be an ambitious undertaking. If this project is not done on a large scale and at the highest level of quality – both technical and with regard to scholarship and curatorial expertise – it will not be worth doing. Without such scale and excellence, the world will be better off if we all just concentrate on our national and regional projects and let the commercial search engines find the material – something which we all know they are very good at. So we must aim high.
As the specialists who will attend tomorrow’s meeting will see and discuss in detail, we envision a project that will include three elements:
First, a network of scanning centers around the world, concentrated in developing countries, that will produce the content needed for the World Digital Library.
Second, a powerful, multilingual website through which the public can access the vast repository of digital content that will be created by these scan centers.
Third, a state-of-the-art network that enables content to be distributed around the world in a way that is fast and reliable and that can be preserved over time.
A network of scanning centers, located mainly in cultural institutions in developing countries, is needed to carry out the digitization of important cultural artifacts in these countries, thereby making sure that all cultures and languages are represented in the World Digital Library.
The Library of Congress already has worked with our fellow national libraries in Brazil and Egypt in setting up these kinds of centers, building on our experience going back to the late 1990s in working with the Russian State Library and the National Library of Russia. The content produced by these scanning centers, supplemented by content contributed from existing projects, will begin to fill up the World Digital Library repository.
The material to be digitized should include not only paper and printed works, but video and audio material that document cultural traditions that are in danger of being lost to humanity. I think in particular of the music in many languages and from many cultures that needs to be captured and preserved before it is gone.
Our second challenge is to build a powerful World Digital Library website that allows for maximal exploitation of this content. The site has to be multilingual, not just with regard to its content, but its functionality as well. A reasonable starting objective is full search and display capability in seven languages, with others to be added later.
The website must provide interesting and innovative pathways into the repository of material so that students, educators, and all users are encouraged to explore, will be inspired, and will come back again and again for education and enjoyment. It must employ maps, time-lines, and other features that facilitate asking the questions that are appropriate to an initiative that is global in scope: At a given place, what cultures and civilizations rose and fell over the centuries and millennia, and what traces of them remain? At a given time, what was happening in Europe, China, Egypt, or other parts of the world?
The World Digital Library also needs to have interactive features – blogs, special presentations, chats with curators – that will encourage people to be participants in rather than just passive users of the World Digital Library.
Our third challenge is to build a robust network, based on a system of mirror sites, that enables all regions of the world to provide access to all of the content in the World Digital Library and that supports the goals of preservation, high performance, and constant availability.
Following from this first general point about thinking big and setting ambitious goals, my second point concerns how to achieve these goals. The Library of Congress, with the support of UNESCO, is convening this experts meeting to begin a discussion on how to carry out something on this scale and complexity. The Library of Congress hopes to continue to be a facilitator in this process. Our purpose is not to control, but to bring all of the interested parties together to undertake this effort. No one institution can do any of this work alone. It will take a network of committed partners to lead the way.
The Library of Congress cannot raise all of the funding or garner all of the in-kind contributions that will be needed to create a World Digital Library on this scale. We have a large and skilled workforce, but we do not have the translators, programmers, web designers, subject matter experts, and other specialists that will be required for this effort.
Not least, while the international and foreign language collections of the Library of Congress are huge, we do not have the most important collections of cultural materials from countries around the world that will need to be scanned for inclusion in a World Digital Library.
For this reason, we need to work with partners to build capacity – to install equipment and train staff – so that institutions in these countries can select and digitize the material for the World Digital Library, material, that I might add, which under the non-exclusivity principle that we are following and have always followed in our digital library partnerships, also can be used to develop national and regional digital library projects.
In sum, I hope that many of the questions regarding the World Digital Library largely answer themselves as we go forward with an effort this complex and this ambitious. It will have to be a cooperative effort, engaging the skills and taking into account the interests of all potential partners, otherwise it will not succeed. The only way it can live up to the vision that many of us have for this project is to enlist the support and enthusiastic participation of a broad community of librarians, scholars, and private and governmental funders. With UNESCO’s help, we hope to begin building that support in this important meeting.
These points need to be elaborated and discussed in detail. We will begin this process tomorrow morning at UNESCO headquarters. I look forward to seeing many of you there, and to hearing your ideas and suggestions.
Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your comments and suggestions, and to working with all of you in realizing this ambitious effort.
