World Digital Library to launch on April 21, 02009

According to this blurb on its site, "The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research." First proposed to UNESCO in 2005 by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, the WDL is largely a project of the Library of Congress with contributions from UNESCO, IFLA, around three dozen partner institutions and Google, Inc.