According to the Bibliotheca Universalis Web site, their mission is “to put major works of worldwide cultural and scientific heritage comprising text, images and sound, at the disposal of the general public using communication and information technology.”

This is the beginning of one-stop portal access to select material from 13 international digital libraries. It started as a G7 project of the Global Information Society.

English language partners include offerings from The Library of Congress in the United States, the National Library of Canada [French and English sections], and The British Library in the United Kingdom. In the search options, under the "collections" link, it appears that only the browse by institution selection works. In their Technical Section they provide links to Web sites that provide background resources on some of the issues they have encountered in this project, such as incompatibility in digitization standards and mixed interoperability and metadata standards.

They have an impressive mission, but it has so far to go. The depth and richness of resources depends on the authoritativeness, quality, and usability of the content the partners make available. A particularly rich resource is Global Gateway: World Culture & Resources (Library of Congress).