Last March, Google donated $1.25 million to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory (NMCM) to help digitize the South African leader's archives. One year later, the Nelson Mandela Digital Archive is complete.
The grant allowed the Johannesburg-based NMCM to take thousands of documents, photos, and videos from Mandela's life and put them online. The archives, accessible via nelsonmandela.org, offer a comprehensive look at the life of legendary leader, including correspondence with family and friends, diaries from his 27 years in prison, and notes recorded during negotiations that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.
Among some of the highlights in the archives are the earliest-known photo of Mandela and drafts from the sequel to his autobiography.
The archives divide his life into different eras and topical sections: early years, prison years, presidential years, retirement, books for Mandela, young people, and my moments with a legend. Each takes a curated look at a related part of his life.
"You can immediately see a curated set of materials threaded together into a broader narrative," Mark Yoshitake, a product manager with the Google Cultural Institute, wrote in a blog post. "These include handwritten notes on his desk calendars, which show, for example, that he met President F.W. De Klerk for the first time on December 13, 1989 for two and a half hours in prison; the Warrants of Committal issued by the Supreme Court which sent him to prison; the earliest known photo of Nelson Mandela's prison cell on Robben Island circa 1971; and a personal letter written from prison in 1963 to his daughters, Zeni and Zindzi, after their mother was arrested, complete with transcript."
The project was undertaken by the NMCM and the Google Cultural Institute, which has contributed to a number of projects intended to preserve important parts of history. For example, in partnership with the Yad Vashem Museum in Israel, Google created the world's largest archive of Holocaust photos and documents.
There's also Google Art Project, which harnesses Google Street View technology to give Web surfers glimpses inside the galleries of museums all over the world. Google has also helped put the Dead Sea Scrolls online.