Launched in January 2000 by the Carnegie Mellon University
(Pennsylvania, United States), the Million Book Project - also called
the Universal Library or Universal Digital Library (UDL) - aimed to
digitize one million books in a number of languages, including in India
and China. The project was completed in 2007, with one million books
available on the university website, as image files in DjVu and TIFF
formats, and with three mirror sites in northern China, southern China,
and India. The project may have inspired the Open Content Alliance
(OCA), a universal public digital library launched by the Internet
Archive in October 2005.
February 2000 > yourDictionary.com, a portal for linguistic tools in
all languages
Robert Beard, a professor at Bucknell University (USA), co-founded
yourDictionary.com in February 2000, as a follow-up of his first
website, A Web of Online Dictionaries (included in the new one),
launched in 1995 as a directory of online dictionaries (with 800 links
in fall 1998) and other linguistic resources such as thesauri,
vocabularies, glossaries, grammars, and language textbooks.
yourDictionary.com included 1,800 dictionaries in 250 languages in
September 2003, and 2,500 dictionaries in 300 languages in April 2007.
As a tool for all languages without exception, the portal also offered
the Endangered Language Repository.