Universal Library - Modern Times

Modern Times

With the advent of cheap, widely available digital storage, the ideal of universality, although still impossible to attain, has become closer to the feasible. Many projects are now attempting to collect a section of human knowledge into one database. These projects vary in breadth and scope, and none are complete. Examples include digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg and Carnegie-Mellon's Universal library, digital libraries which are using book scanning to collect public domain works; The European Library, an integrated catalog for Europe's national libraries; and the Wikimedia Foundation, which, using the Wiki system, is attempting to collect the breadth of important human knowledge under various open content projects such as Wikipedia and Wiktionary. However, many technical and legal problems remain for the dissemination of all possible knowledge on the Internet.

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