Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

ViewPoint – Great New Possibilities for the Library of Congress

Colleagues – we have worked for many years, often many decades, as members of a profession to which we have a deep and abiding commitment and through which we have, under often the most challenging of circumstances, helped to usher in the future without forsaking the past. So this snippet (the rest is behind a paywall) from the New York Review of Books, has a sense of preaching to the choir but we cannot refrain from the mantra – keep it free, keep it public, keep it available to All, and keep it going:  “Until now, digital development has taken place primarily in the private sector. While corporations such as Google were dominating the Internet, the public interest in the digital realm was left to private initiative. The Digital Public Library of America, based in Boston, has begun to link the collections of research libraries in a national network, which now makes ten million items available free of charge to everyone with access to the Internet. The Internet Archive, with headquarters in San Francisco, performs a similar service by harvesting texts from millions of websites as well as books. HathiTrust, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, preserves the texts of 13.4 million volumes, largely from collections that were digitized by Google. (Google’s own database cannot be made available as a commercial digital library, owing to a decision of a federal district court, which declared Google Book Search illegal in 2010.) Each of these initiatives provides valuable services. Although they overlap in places, they should be maintained—and above all, they should be integrated in a single system so that everyone has access to all of the country’s cultural resources. The Library of Congress is the richest resource of all. As it is supported by public funds, the public should be able to tap its collections—160 million items, of which 37.8 million are books and other print materials—by means of the Internet.”

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.