Alert, digital bookworms! by Nina Gotzmannova

Do you like the smell of old paper and old books? When you flip through the pages, do you remember the stream of adrenaline in your veins when you find something really old, forgotten or valuable in the bookshelves? Maybe you will continue on having these feelings in a new digital library of United States and United Nation will open soon. But only in a virtual world. In 2005 was open the Library of Congress. Since then people can read thousands of digitized records from cultures all around the world. This World Digital Library will be just an upgrade. According to UNESCO, in this library will be unique and rare materials from libraries and other cultural institutions around the world. Among books there will be manuscripts, maps, sound recordings, films or photographs. They will be accessible for everyone for free. People would be able to read the materials in six official United Nations languages & Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. They will have an option to search and browse materials by several criteria, such as place, time or topic. The project of digitalizing books and other materials has several advantages. People don't have to worry they wouldn't have place to store all the books they want to read, they will just save them on computer. They will be able to read whatever around the world, meet the books they are hard to find and access the library anytime or anyplace. The books are also safe in case of robbery, floods or fire. But there are also some disadvantages. If the server, where the material will be stores, would be hacked or would have some problems, it's harder to solve it. And one more ‘romantic' disadvantage & the book in the computer simply has no pages to rustle and no smell of old paper to feel.

related story: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20071017/tot-uk-un-library-b86c26b_2.html

by Nina Gotzmannova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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