World Digital Library

Gary and Danny at SearchEngineWatch provide a good summary of the Library of Congress/Google partnership, the World Digital Library, and note some of the other major book digitization projects.

The seed for this project was sown by James Billington, in a speech to UNESCO in June, according to SEW. (links in the SEW article)

I wonder if Google approached LC or vice versa?

Something many of us fret about is the sustainability of these digitizing projects from several aspects: funding, archiving, and durability, for instance. Clay Shirky recently gave a lecture on the issue of durability in San Francisco as part of The Long Now Foundations seminars on long-term thinking.

The lecture, "Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories" was to address "one of the most intractable problems of the information age: how to preserve digital information and tools in usable condition beyond ten years." I would have loved to be there...I like what Clay writes about social software, and he is apparently a great speaker. The good news is The Long Now does record its seminars and makes them available here. I see Ray Kurzweil's September 2005 lecture is up so the wait shouldn't be too long.

And a couple of attendees blogged about the lecture, including Merrilee from RLG at hangingtogether and More Like This and Paul Miller at Demos Greenhouse.