This one's for the culture vultures. Today sees the launch of the World Digital Library, an initiative of UNESCO and 32 partner institutions that sees placed on the web, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant and unique cultural materials from libraries and archives around the world. The site will include manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, and prints and photographs.
According to the UNESCO website, examples of treasures that will be featured on the WDL include oracle bones and steles contributed by the National Library of China; Arabic scientific manuscripts from the National Library and Archives of Egypt; early photographs of Latin America from the National Library of Brazil; the Hyakumanto darani, a publication from the year 764 from the National Diet Library of Japan; the famous 13th century “Devil’s Bible” from the National Library of Sweden; and works of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish calligraphy from the collections of the Library of Congress. None of which I think feature on any of your reading lists, but are interesting, not only in their own right, but as examples of the pervasiveness of digitisation
Sadly for you dear reader, the likes of Understanding Organisational Context and Exploring Corporate Strategy do not qualify as rare or significant cultural materials, but you can find them free of charge on the web courtesy of DBS if you have a Dawsonera account.
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