On the morning of January 14, at the “Transformation and development: Library serves the future – Seminar on Library Information Commons” held at Zhejiang University, Robert Miller, Global Director of Books of the largest U.S. non-profit digital library “Internet Archive”, signed a donation agreement with Vice-President Luo Weidong to donate 700,000 paper books in foreign languages to Zhejiang University.

 

"This is the largest number of foreign language books donated since the founding of PRC.”Huang Chen, deputy director of Zhejiang University Library, introduced. These books cover all disciplines. “Currently three containers carrying 65,000 books have already arrived at Zhejiang University. The others will arrive in the next 3 to 4 years in containers shipped every 40 days.”

 

Zhejiang University Library has transformed audio-visual reading room into a reading room for special collections of these books to provide storage and service for the first batch of 100,000 books. Currently 20,000 books have already been on the shelf available for reading services.

 

Founded in 1996, Internet Archive is a non-profit offering permanent storage of and free public access to collections of digital materials. It is in a close cooperation with China Academic Digital Associative Library, a project managed by Zhejiang University. In CADAL Project Phase II, Internet Archive provided the digitization of more than 400,000 books in foreign languages.