World Digital Library: Ultimate add-on for the OLPC laptop, among other uses?

By David Rothman

The multimedia, multicultural World Digital Library project is now stepping up promo in the wake of a new agreement with UNESCO. Shown here in an older video from December.

Might this someday be the ultimate add-on for the One Laptop per Child laptop—complete with displays of “artifacts ranging from a photo collection of a 19th-century Brazilian empress to a crackly recording of the 101-year-old grandson of a slave”?

Check out not just the video but also background at Wikipedia and articles in the New York Times (source of above quote), Washington Post and elsewhere,

The C factor—and the need to look beyond unencumbered items

Here’s hoping that copyright laws won’t get in the way more than I fear they will. At the same time I want fair compensation for writers and publishers. That means reason on everyone’s part. In existing digitization efforts, the U.S. Library of Congress, a prime mover of the project, has steered away from copyrighted books.

Publishers need to ask, “Do we really want to educate people just to use old, unencumbered content without simultaneously giving them instant access to modern writings to help put the source material in context?” E-commerce links in the “buy the book” vein aren’t enough. I want the ability for readers to move, say, from the slave recording to the most relevant passages from modern books about slavery.

For now, the philosophy of World Digital Library is apparently to focus on the source texts and images from the past without extensively integrating modern copyrighted content. I applaud the interest in preservation, which indeed should be priority number one. But this limited approach is a mistake, as I see it, and ultimately could backfire on the very publishers that feared the inclusion of their wares. I’d love to see the WDL turn into a general library going beyond either the Google collections or the Euro library initiative competing against the company. Yes, WDL ideally could include popular-level works, many of which could encourage readers to explore more literary or scholarly fare.

Encouragement from major international publishers could go a long way and boost their bottom lines. A full-service library would be in line with the TeleRead vision I’ve been propounding since the early 1990s. The WDL could seamlessly link national digital library systems in ways that went far, far beyond the current concept. In fact, the library is already off to a good start in that regard with the involvement of UNESCO and national libraries in the States, Egypt, Korea and Russia, among others, in addition to participation by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.

Big Bro issue

Yet another issue will be the penchant of some nations for censorship.

Will their citizens enjoy full access without having to do work-arounds, as many do in China to bypass the local Big Brothers.

The F Word

More immediately, I hope that the books and other texts there will be conveniently downloadable in a variety of formats fit for PDA, cellphones and other less than fully powered devices, including the OLPC laptop. Libraries shouldn’t just be for academics and other researchers; the world at large should be able to enjoy the books within them.

Official description from About page: “The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, archi­tectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.”

Friendly tip for the Library of Congress: Get solidly behind the IDPF’s .epub standard for digital publications.

Related: My TeleRead chatper from Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier, an MIT Press/ASIS book (limited access). TeleRead, of course, has much evolved since then.

(Thanks to Mike Cane for some links.)

Technorati Tags: World Digital Library , WDL , OLPC , One Laptop Per Child , Library of Congress , TeleRead, UNESCO