World Digital Library

The World Digital Library (WDL) is a project by the American Library of Congress, to digitally preserve books and other objects from all world cultures.

Librarian of Congress James Billington said in a phone interview to Reuters that "The World Digital Library is an attempt to go beyond Europe and the Americas...into cultures where the majority of the world is."

Google, which runs the competing Google Book Search project, has donated USD$3 million to the project, developing the standards for indexing the collection, and providing computer equipment to run the project. It is possible Google will continue to world tightly with the WDL, partnered in competition with the Open Content Alliance.