A professor from an American university has described a project to make all the authored works of mankind available on the Internet.
Professor Raj Reddy, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, outlined the Universal Library Project during a lecture at the University of Hong Kong.
He said digital libraries and information-on-demand systems still faced technical, economic and legal problems.
Professor Reddy, who is a Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, was delivering the William Mong Distinguished Lecture in Engineering and Computer Science.
He said the universal library project would involve making available to all Internet users, books, newspapers and magazines, music, movies and videos, lectures, works of art, articles and government rules and regulations.
'This is a major initiative in digital libraries, that will build a technically realistic and economically practical infrastructure for putting and accessing library documents on the World Wide Web,' he said.