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  3. A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on

A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on

admin2012-01-27  49
问题     A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on the Internet, serving up mankind’s accumulated knowledge in seven languages for students around the world.
    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 site (www.wdl.org) has put up the Japanese work that is considered the first novel in history, for instance, along with the Aztecs’ first mention of the Christ child in the New World and the works of ancient Arab scholars piercing the mysteries of algebra(代数), each entry flanked by learned commentary. "There are many one-of-a-kind documents," Billington said in an interview.
    The World Digital Library, which officially will be inaugurated (落成典礼) recently at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has started small, with about 1,200 documents and their explanations from scholars in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian. But it is designed to accommodate an unlimited number of such texts, charts and illustrations from as many countries and libraries as want to contribute.
    The main target is children, building on the success among young people of the U.S. National Digital Library Program, which has been in operation at the Library of Congress since the mid-1990s. That program, at its American Memory site, has made available 15 million U.S. historical records, including recorded interviews with former slaves, the first moving pictures and the Declaration of Independence. Billington predicted that children around the world, like their U.S. counterparts, will turn naturally to the Internet for answers to questions, provided they have access to computers and high-speed connections.
    The site was developed by a team at the Library of Congress in Washington with technical assistance from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. The digital library’s main server is also in Washington, but officials said plans are underway for regional servers around the world.
    In addition to UNESCO and the Library of Congress, 26 other libraries and institutions in 19 countries have contributed to the project. Each is accompanied by a brief explanation of its content and significance. The documents have been scanned onto the site directly, in their original languages, but the explanations appear in all seven of the site’s official languages.
    Users can sort through the information in several ways. They can ask what was going on anywhere in the world in, say, science or literature during the 4th century B.C., for instance. They can look up the history of a certain topic over the centuries in China alone, or in China and North America. By cross-referencing, a user can see how one area of the world stood compared with another at any given time.
What’s the main purpose of this passage?
选项 A、To make people pay more attention to libraries.
B、To introduce the World Digital Library clearly.
C、To arouse people’s awareness of protecting our culture.
D、To tell people how to take advantage of digital libraries.
答案B
解析 本文首先讲联合国数字图书馆已经接入互联网，接着介绍联合国数字图书馆创建的目的、选址、规模及主要服务对象，然后介绍联合国数字图书馆得到的各方面的支持以及用户查寻信息的途径。由此可知，本文的主要目的是清楚地介绍世界数字图书馆的相关情况，故答案为[B]。
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