Thanks to Ann Higgins for sending me a fun article from the Washington Post (Checking Out Tomorrow’s Library) as a librarian I loved it.

It introduces the World Digital Library an effort to digitize the accumulated wisdom of humankind, catalogue it, and offer it for free on the Internet in seven languages. Apparently parts of the library may be available as soon as a year from now. People got a sneak peek last week of the tool – well a prototype. It allowed searches by time, geographical location, topic and format, with the ability to narrow results by limiting them to books, photographs, movies or recordings.

What’s nice to see is that the US is taking a lead in the project with the two main partners being is being the Library of Congress in partnership with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It’s nice for two reasons – one is implies that the US is still a leader online information-wise even if we’re slipping in broadband penetration and two, I’m glad that we’re using the leadership to level the playing field and help other communities become publishers.

I think we’ve seen on a individual level how much richer the Internet has become with more publishers – imagine that now on a world level.