I took a peek at the World Digital Library, which was launched today, and found all sorts of curiosities.
As I’m currently studying the opera Carmen as part of a university course, I was interested to find an 1872 manuscript, handwritten by Bizet, of the ‘Havanaise’ from his opera Carmen as well as a short film dating from 1898-1899 by the Lumière brothers of a traditional bullfight in Seville, Spain.
I also stumbled upon a more amusing item: a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, signed by three girls identifying themselves as “Elvis Presley Lovers,” begging the president not to allow Elvis’s sideburns to be cut off after he was conscripted into the army in 1958!
The digital library is an initiative between the Library of Congress, Unesco and 32 partner institutions. It’s a web site containing digitised books, journals, manuscripts, maps, motion pictures, prints, photographs and sound recordings from libraries and archives around the world. It’s free to browse, easy to search (by country, date, topic, type of item or institution) and you can share discoveries with others by any number of social networking tools (some of which I’d heard of, some I hadn’t).
You don’t get the same kick out of seeing digital versions of these cultural materials as you do from seeing the original. However, maybe you otherwise wouldn’t get to see the original at all – the site has items from national libraries ranging from Iraq, Brazil and China to Russia, Israel and Serbia -- or maybe this site may prompt a visit to one of the libraries or institutes.
One discovery I made for example was a beautiful illuminated page in Javanese script from a chronicle of a Javanese court in Yogyakarta. Since my travels to Java and other Indonesian islands, I do have a soft spot for Indonesian culture. And this particular item is at an institute in Leiden (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies), which really isn’t that far at all from my current home town of Brussels.
Go and explore and see what you find at www.wdl.org!
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