World Digital Library

The Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, announced that Google is the first private-sector company to contribute to its World Digital Library initiative. In a speech to the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO on June 6, 2005, Billington proposed creating a World Digital Library "that would seek to create for other cultures, languages, and nations the documentary record of their distinctive cultural achievements and aspirations—rather as we have tried to do for our own country with the ongoing American Memory project of putting primary culture and history documents online."