I just found out about the launch of the World Digital Library, a free online library that has crap-tons of books, photographs, drawings, manuscripts, &c. It's not any sort of scam. They haven't even asked for my email address yet. It's just that sort of utopian free-information-for-everyone-for-the-betterment-of-humanity gig. Which is great. I've been poking around it for a while this morning and found The Book of Urizen, one of William Blake's gorgeous engraved books. This isn't just a bunch of jpegs. You get really high quality images that you can zoom in/out with, which is a real treat with the hand-colored plates that make up Urizen. The quality is good enough to read. This might be crazy nerdy, but i am insanely excited about this library. I also found a book of 100 Japanese poems by 100 poets dating from the late 17th century. For anyone who can read it, i'm sure it's fascinating. Anyway, it just launched today, so keep an eye out for expanding holdings. I'm sure they'll be putting stuff up constantly.
Finally, the last things about the WDL i want to mention is the interface. There are a lot of different ways to browse the collection, which lets you stumble upon things in a much more interesting way than having to guess what might be interesting based on title or abstract. It looks like this is going to be a really kickass resource.
AND: reading tomorrow night! Longfellow Books! be there! Betsy Scholl! Should be great! 7PM!
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