• 2015-11-07

NCL participated in the 2015 World Digital Library Annual Meeting and the 4th International Summit of the Book.In an effort to help disseminate mankind’s knowledge and to display the beauty of its holdings, NCL has actively participated in the WDL since 2008 by providing high-quality digitized holdings and attending the annual meeting. This year (2015) NCL not only sent a delegation to the annual meeting on November 5-6 at the Egyptian Bibliotheca Alexandrina, it also participated in the 4th International Summit of the Book held on the 6th and 7th. As of October 2015 WDL was comprised of 190 member organizations from 81 countries. WDL’s website already has over 211,397,911 images with seven languages available for navigation (with content totaling over 32.5 million words). NCL has, to date, uploaded 121 digitized ancient books, abstracts, and metadata. In this year’s meeting NCL submitted the abstracts, metadata, and images for 30 more works that cover six genres. These will be uploaded by the executive organization, the U.S. Library of Congress, sometime next year. The theme of this year’s summit was Books, Reading, and Technology. Discussion centered on the role of translation in cultural preservation and dissemination, and on the importance of books in cultural exchange. The annual meeting saw discussion on the development of formatting for digitized books, its influence on reading, on challenges faced by book publishers (especially as it pertains to African and Arabic language countries), and on the role reading and books play in varying countries.