Bringing the world’s treasures to your desk

The launch last month of the World Digital Library brings a dazzling collection of cultural treasures within everyone’s reach. These range from San rock paintings in South Africa dating back perhaps 6000 years to a photograph of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley in the Oval Office in 1970; from an exact reproduction of the US Declaration of Independence to a 1900 guide to the Great Siberian Railway printed in English and Russian by the Russian Ministry of Ways of Communication; from a sound recording of a 1949 interview with a 101-year-old American former slave to Bracelli’s bizarre 17th century etchings of the human shape in geometric form.