The Best Digital Libraries in the World

Libraries which store knowledge, research, history, and so much more are considered as a huge resource to community. They are places where people can improve a document or interact with each other. Nowadays, the internet is a major information-gathering tool where everything can be found. So, the digital library was created as an achievement of high technology.

Going digital library helps you to save time and study more effectively. You can directly read a book online without going to a bookstore to
preview or buy it. Digital libraries make it easier to access literature and information. Using a phone or a tablet, you can find any book which
was hidden or had disappeared from a traditional library in your vicinity. The majority of the digital libraries are invaluable sources of data containing books, maps, films and audio-books.

Thanks to the proliferation of the digitization of archives, we now have hundreds of thousands of online libraries, and some of them are simply
wonderful. We look at six of the most popular digital libraries in the world, and what makes them distinctively different.

1- The World Digital Library
The World Digital Library (WDL) is a cooperative project of the Library of Congress, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and partner libraries, archives, and educational and cultural institutions from the United States of America and around the world. The project brings together, on a single website, rare and unique documents – books, journals, manuscripts, maps, prints and photographs, films, and sound recordings – that tell the story of the world’s cultures.

Dr. James H. Billington, a former Librarian of Congress, was nominated as a commissioner of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO and was invited to give a plenary speech at its inaugural conference in June 2005. His speech, entitled ‘A View of the Digital World Library’, described a vision in which the rich collections that “institutions, libraries, and museums have preserved could be given back to the world free of charge and in a new form far more universal ly accessible than any forms that have preceded it.” The WDL is intended for general users, students, teachers, and scholars. Its interface operates in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. The actual documents on the site are presented in their original languages.

2- Universal Digital Library
The mission of the Universal Digital Library is to create a universal library which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge. As a first step in realizing this mission, it is proposed to create a universal library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is expected that the collection will grow to 10 million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world all t he t ime, e very d ay, w ithout r egard t o nationality or socioeconomic background.

One of the goals of the Universal Digital Library is to provide support for full text indexing and searching based on optical character recognition (OCR) technologies where available. The availability of online search allows users to locate relevant information quickly and reliably, thus enhancing users’ success in their research endeavors. This 24/7 resource would also provide an excellent test bed for language processing research in areas such as machine translation, summarization, intelligent indexing, and information retrieval.

The primary long-term objective is to capture all books in digital format. It is believed that such a task is impossible and could take hundreds of
years, and never be completed. Thus, a first step was to demonstrate the feasibility by undertaking to digitize one million books (less than 1% of all books in all languages ever published). This was achieved in the 2006 - 2007 timeframe.

3- Bartleby
Bartleby is a student success hub, developed by Barnes & Noble Education, Inc. (NYSE:BNED) as part of its ongoing mission to serve all who
work to elevate their lives through education. Bartleby’s products and services are designed to improve student success and outcomes, offering pathways for learning that fit the schedules and demands of today’s student.

Current offerings on the Bartleby platform include Bartleby learn, Bartleby write, and Bartleby research. Bartleby learn is a guide to
better learning, providing access to millions of step-by-step textbook solutions, a vast, searchable Q&A library, and subject matter experts on standby 24/7 to provide thorough answers to homework questions. Bartleby learn helps ensure that users not only get the correct answer but that they will also understand how to solve the problem on their own come exam time. Bartleby write is a 24/7 stress-free virtual writing center designed to spot mistakes, build better writing habits and transform okay papers into stellar ones with its spelling and grammar check, plagiarism detection, and citation assistance. It will also give the user a preliminary score; so, they will know how their paper stacks up. With Bartleby write, one can submit one’s papers with confidence. Bartleby research sparks the write idea, helping students to jumpstart their writing assignments. It offers access to thousands of student-penned essays that can act as thought starters for students struggling to draft their own paper.

4- ibiblio
Home to one of the largest “collections of collections” on the Internet, www.ibiblio.org is an online public library with freely available software and information, for topics such as music, literature, art, history, science, politics,  and cultural studies. With between 12 million and 16 million worldwide transactions per day, it is a resource used frequently by audiences of all interests and backgrounds.

The collaboration has multiple components, including programs to: Expand and improve the distribution of open source software; Continue UNC’s programs to develop an online library and archive; Host and foster projects that expand the concepts of transparency and openness into new areas; Create, expand, improve, publish, and distribute research on the open source communities; Expand and improve the creation of and distribution of open source software and documentation; and Serve as a model for other open source projects.

Today, www.ibiblio.org continues its role as a technology pioneer by expanding its realm from simply Web-based services – it is involved in Internet 2 projects, 3-D environments and video archiving, and it supports NASA educational videos and the streaming of seven not-for-profit radio stations. www.ibiblio.org is also involved in free software development directly with several local projects as well as leadership in the Linux Documentation Project.

5- Google Books Library Project
Google Books is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database. Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google’s library partners through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives.

The Google Books initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online body of human knowledge and promoting the democratization of knowledge. However, it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations, and lack of editing to correct the many errors introduced into the scanned texts by the OCR process.

As of October 2015, the number of scanned book titles was over 25 million, but the scanning process has slowed down in American academic libraries. Google estimated in 2010 that there were about 130 million distinct titles in the world, and stated that it intended to scan all of them. As of October 2019, Google celebrated 15 years of Google Books and provided the number of scanned books as more than 40 million titles. The Google Books has a number of partners, most notably: Harvard University Library, University of Michigan Library, Bodleian Library at Oxford University, and Stanford University Libraries.

6- Internet Archive
The Internet Archive, a non-profit website, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, it provides free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the printdisabled, and the general public. Its mission is to provide universal access to all knowledge. The Internet Archive began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral - but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today, it has more than 20 years of web history accessibility through the Wayback Machine and it works with 625+ library and other partners through the Archive-It program to identify important web pages. The website’s archive currently contains: 330 billion web pages; 20 million b ooks a nd t exts; 4 .5 m illion a udio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts); 4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs); 3 million images and 200,000 software programs.

Anyone with a free account can upload media to the Internet Archive. It works with thousands of partners globally to save copies of their work into special collections. It began a program to digitize books in 2005 and as of today, it scans 1,000 books per day in 28 locations around the world. Books published prior to 1923 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of modern books can be borrowed through Open Library site, which is an online project intended to create “one web page for every book ever published”. Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. It has been funded in part by grants from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Open Library provides online access to many public domain and out-of-print books.

Like the Internet, television is also an ephemeral medium. The Internet Archive began archiving television programs in late 2000, and the first public TV project was an archive of TV news surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. In 2009, it began to make selected U.S. television news broadcasts searchable by captions in TV News Archive. This service allows researchers and the public to use television as a citable and sharable reference.

Sources: (www.rpilib.org; www.faena.com wikipedia.org and the websites of the mentioned libraries)