The World Digital Library (WDL) is a multilingual digital library under the umbrella of UNESCO managed by the Library of Congress in collaboration with hundreds of library institutions worldwide. The Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism is the Italian partner; the General Directorate for Books, Archives and Libraries coordinates the contribution of State libraries through the ICCU.

The main objectives of the WDL are to stimulate dialogue, to promote the international and intercultural cooperation, to increase the quality and variety of cultural contents available online, to make interesting resources available to docents, students, and to the public at large, to contribute to the spread of knowledge and of scientific research, and to build abilities in partner institutions in order to reduce the digital gap within and among nations. The WDL makes freely available online materials that represent the different cultures of the world. Manuscripts, letters, maps, prints, newspapers, rare books, documents, videos, sound recordings, posters and illustrations are shared by institutions all over the world, from the Library of Congress to the Library of Alexandria, the Brazil national libraries, China, Russia, Israel, Serbia, France, Sweden, Uganda, Iraq, Taiwan, and many others – the list now includes over one hundred institutions and is constantly growing.

The WDL portal was officially launched on 21 April 2009 and currently provides access to full high-resolution digital reproductions of about 1,500 objects, along with bibliographic descriptions written according to the WDL specific descriptive standards and available in the six official languages of UNESCO (English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish) and in Portuguese as well. The search (by geographic area, type, historical period, topic and institution) is also  available in seven languages.