The primary goal of the 4C initiative is to provide universal digital access to orphan books. An orphan book is one where neither the publisher nor the author are receiving any material income from a copyrighted asset. However, an orphan book can still have immense educational, cultural and artistic value. The 4C initiative would pay the content owner a fee for every (unique) reading of the book. The goal of the 4C initiative is to make these books available to the public at large by providing the authors and publishers the opportunity to monetize their books. The same principle can be applied to recently published material. In this scenario, UDL will process the payment from the reader to the content owner. 4C is being established with support from the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India. By encouraging contribution of in copyright books, this initiative will help the UDL make strides towards its long term goal of digitizing all content.

The primary goal of the Newspapers Digital Library is to preserve news for its historical value for generations to come. This initiative also plans to be a single point of access to the over 20,000 newspapers worldwide. With most of the current newspapers being born digital, the digitization challenge is more or less solved. The key challenge will be to convince the publishers to share the information with the UDL. The plan is for the UDL to perform the search and retrieval with the web traffic being directed to the actual publisher. The publisher can then potentially derive economic value from the web traffic. It is expected that this initiative will expand the reach and longevity of small scale publishers.

Given the chance, every man, woman and child would like to visit at least one of the Seven Wonders of the World. However, over 99% of us never get the opportunity to see any of them. Advances in information and communication technologies make it possible for us to experience the pleasure of visiting these locations without physically going there. The UDL is proposing a multi-national effort to begin to create the content and make it accessible around the world so that anyone who wishes to visit one of these sites virtually can do so with the click of a mouse from the comfort of their home or office. While the necessary research has been done, 3D modeling of each of these locations can be expensive and time consuming. Another proposed approach is for a robot or a human being acting as a tour guide wearing a ring camera helmet providing a 360 degree view linked to the rest of the world with high speed wireless connection connected to fiber linking the entire world. We propose to utilize both approaches as part of this project.

The center for innovations in speech and language (CISL) at Carnegie Mellon West is partnering with UDL to collect and annotate at least one million hours recorded speech. This initiative is designed to support research into innovative methodologies in knowledge representation and knowledge acquisition applied to speech recognition and synthesis. This very ambitious data collection effort comprising at least a million hours of recorded speech in at least 100 languages will be accomplished by utilizing UDL centers all over the globe as speech collection centers. This Million-Hour Corpus will be the basis for a major international research program aimed at dramatically improving the performance of speech recognition and speech synthesis systems, as well as making these technologies available is many more languages.