The Past of Documents
To better contemplate the transformations that the document has undergone, it is sometimes good to look back at the past of the documents.
That’s one wat of looking at the United Nations’ World Digital Library. It showcases “documents” such as rock paintings, parchments, manuscripts or other extremely interesting pieces of the human history – this with a cool navigation User Interface.
The material is drawn from around 30 libraries and archives from around the world, and dates back to up to 8,000 BC. It should expand later to non-Western items in the future – 380 from the 1170 current items being from Europe. Interestingly enough, these documents are still covered by the copyright law that applies in their country – the longest copyright period ever !
