An online collection of primary documents and digital artifacts was launched April 21 in Paris by UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, with the goal of promoting international and intercultural understanding.

The World Digital Library seeks to "display and explain the wealth of all human cultures," according to the European Journalism Centre. James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress who launched the project four years ago, said the "ambition was to make available on an easy-to-navigate site, free for scholars and other curious people anywhere, a collection of primary documents and authoritative explanations from the planet's leading libraries."

The project has started small, with about 1,200 documents (from 26 institutions in 19 countries) and their explanations from scholars in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. It is designed to accommodate an unlimited number of such texts, charts and illustrations from as many countries and libraries as want to contribute.

To visit the World Digital Library, go to http://www.wdl.org/en/.