Peter Suber at Open Access News reports on the progress of the Universal Digital Library Project. The UDL now gives readers access to 1.5 million books. The user interface at UDL is rather minimal and somewhat awkward to use; more attention at UDL needs to be given to web design improvements that will guide the user's explorations of this valuable resource. Presumably the user interface will improve as UDL's emphasis becomes equally distributed between expanding the library's contents and facilitating the library's use. Definitely worth a visit now, even with the interface limitations. ____JH
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"The mission 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 the Universal Library with a free-to-read, searchable collection of one million books, available to everyone over the Internet. Within 10 years, it is our expectation that the collection will grow to 10 Million books. The result will be a unique resource accessible to anyone in the world 24x7, without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background.
One of the goals of the Universal Library is to provide support for full text indexing and searching based on OCR (optical character recognition) technologies where available. The availability of online search allows users to locate relevant information quickly and reliably thus enhancing student's success in their research endeavors. This 24x7 resource would also provide an excellent test bed for language processing research in areas such as machine translation, summarization, intelligent indexing, and information retrieval."
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