World Digital Library

The World Digital Library has launched and I’ve only been able to take a small moment exploring it. They offer fantastic primary resources from around the globe with high quality images, brilliant descriptions, and more. It’s an easy to use website with search and browse capabilities, giving it an interactive feel that makes one feel like they are navigating their way around the world. The timeline feauture below the world map is an amazing way to narrow or expand the number of items in a given time-frame.

Japanese Battle Standards

As their resources grow I imagine that this will be a great go to place for writing research papers, educational opportunities, and for many a source for learning and expanding cultural knowledge.

World Digital Library

My graduate school professor, Jill Hurst-Wahl of all things digital librarianship, posted this via Twitter and it looks a fantastic project. [WDL]

“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.”

It’s an exciting use of libraries and collections on the Internet. I imagine that it will have many uses in and outside of the class-room too. I didn’t have much to look forward to on April 21, 2009 but now I do!