CDWLDW

CDWLDW is an international collaborative project and digital archive focused on world literature in the digital age. It aims to collect, preserve, and analyze digital editions, translations, and related metadata of literary works from diverse languages and traditions. The project emphasizes open access, interoperability, and scholarly research, with a focus on metadata standards, reproducible analyses, and long-term preservation.

The initiative began in 2015 as a partnership among universities, national libraries, and research institutes. It grew through contributions from librarians, philologists, and data scientists and operates as a nonprofit consortium with a rotating coordinating committee. Its holdings include digitized texts, critical editions, contextual metadata, and data sets created for computational analysis.

CDWLDW uses open data licenses and widely adopted metadata schemas to facilitate reuse and cross-archive discovery. It provides an application programming interface and tools for researchers to search, export metadata, analyze textual variants, and compare translations across languages. The archive emphasizes multilingual support and provenance tracking to document digitization methods and editorial decisions.

In governance terms, the project operates as a non-profit consortium with a light-weight governance structure designed to emphasize community input. It adopts open licenses, clear data provenance, and interoperability with library catalogs and other cultural heritage archives.

CDWLDW has gained recognition within digital humanities and library science as a reliable resource for scholarly editions, variant studies, and cross-cultural research. It also serves as a platform for collaborative annotation and for developing sustainable models of digital preservation and access.