African art rocks the world at digital library

An upside-down rock painting of rain animals — an indication of death in San culture — is among the African treasures listed on the recently launched World Digital Library.

For the San, death was both literal and metaphoric. It involved a shaman’s passage to the spirit world that was believed to exist behind the rock’s surface.

The painting is from the eastern Free State of South Africa, which is noted for its depictions of upside-down antelope in unusual contexts.

An image of the painting is part of the Woodhouse Rock Art Collection of the Department of Library Services at the University of Pretoria.

The collection has more than 23,000 slides, maps, and tracings from rock art sites in South Africa.

The San are hunter-gatherers.

They lived throughout Southern and East Africa for thousands of years before they were displaced by African tribes and European settlers.

They continue to live in the Kalahari Desert of Namibia.

The digital library features unique cultural materials — including manuscripts, maps, rare books, films, sound recordings, prints and photographs — collected from libraries and archives around the world.

The library also has an 1889 map of the Great Trading Routes of the Sahara used by French explorer Edouard Blanc.

The map reflects the growing priority that Europeans gave to land-based trade during the 19th-century imperial Scramble for Africa.

In articles about his work, Blanc stressed the importance of identifying “natural” geographic routes in Africa. This map is hosted by the Library of Congress.

The website was launched by Unesco and 32 partner institutions recently.

It offers unrestricted access, free of charge, to these materials.

The launch was at Unesco headquarters and was co-hosted by director-general Koichiro Matsuura and US Librarian of Congress James H. Billington during a semi-annual meeting of Unesco’s executive board.

Mr Matsuura welcomed the library as a “great initiative that will bridge the knowledge divide, promote mutual understanding and foster cultural and linguistic diversity.”

The project also hopes to expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet, provide resources for educators, scholars and general audiences, and narrow the digital divide within and between countries by building capacity in partner countries.

The library functions in seven languages — Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish — and includes content in more than 40 languages.

Browse and research features facilitate cross-cultural and cross-temporal exploration on the site.

There are vivid descriptions of each item and video, with expert curators talking about selected items.

The library was developed by a team from the Library of Congress.

Technical assistance was provided by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina of Alexandria, Egypt.

Among those contributing to the library are cultural and educational institutions in Brazil, Egypt, China, France, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Qatar, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Sweden, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Other treasures featured include Arabic scientific manuscripts from the National Library and Archives of Egypt; early photographs of Latin America from the National Library of Brazil; the Hyakumanto darani, a publication from the year 764 from the National Diet Library of Japan; the famous 13th century “Devil’s Bible” from the National Library of Sweden; and Arabic, Persian, and Turkish calligraphy from the collections at the US Library of Congress.

Billing first proposed the creation of a digital library to Unesco in 2005, saying such a project could “have the salutary effect of bringing people together by celebrating the depth and uniqueness of different cultures in a single global undertaking.”

“Unesco welcomes the creation of the digital library,” Mr Matsuura said.

Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, Unesco’s Special Envoy for Basic and Higher Education and chair of the Qatar Foundation, said: “Universal education is the key to international understanding. It helps people appreciate other cultures.”

The National Library of China contributed manuscripts, maps, books, and rubbings of steles and oracle bones that span Chinese history.