The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will further expand universal participation in the World Digital Library (WDL). This was announced by the UNESCO's Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information at the opening of the first official meeting of the WDL partners held in Washington, DC. The meeting elected a 7-member Executive Council, including UNESCO and the Library of Congress in their capacity as ex-officio members.
In connection with this meeting the Carnegie Corporation of New York supported a conference of directors and technical staff from libraries, archives, and museums in 11 countries - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan - to identify important documents and collections from these countries that should be added to the WDL.
Under the same grant, which was awarded in July 2009, the WDL worked with the National Library of Uganda (NLU) to establish a Digital Conversion Center at the NLU in Kampala. This center, the first of its kind in Uganda and one of very few in sub-Saharan Africa, is enabling the National Library to digitise documents relating to the history and culture of Uganda for inclusion on its own website and on the WDL. The items digitised are from the NLU and other cooperating institutions in Uganda. Future activities planned under the grant include efforts to build capacity at libraries in South Africa so they, too can contribute collections to the WDL.
The World Digital Library has now 85 partners from about 55 countries. More than 10 million users worldwide have visited the WDL (www.wdl.org) since its official launch in April 2009.
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