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Showing posts with label Public Library of America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Public Library of America. Show all posts

Friday, July 27, 2012

Inside the Quest to Put the World's Libraries Online


The Digital Public Library of America wants to make millions of books, records, and images available to any American with an Internet connection. Can it succeed where others have failed?
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Reuters
In his short story "The Library of Babel," Jorge Luis Borges imagines the universe as a "total library," whose 410-page books have achieved all possible combinations of letters and punctuation. No two books are the same. Some, of course, are gibberish. But others carry the answer to life's deepest mysteries. In Borges's library can be found every thought ever had, every turn of phrase ever uttered, every masterpiece penned by Shakespeare, and even the ones that he never got to write—simply stated, everything.
Borges's fearsome fantasy builds upon a centuries-old conception of the library as an enclosed instantiation of the universe's mighty sprawl. In Advice on Establishing a Library, a classic manual on the creation of a library, the 17th-century French scholar Gabriel Naudé argued that a library "erected for the public benefit ought to be universal," observing that "there is nothing which renders a Library more recommendable, then when every man finds in it that which he is in search of, and could no where else encounter." This sort of accumulation has sometimes come hand-in-hand with power, as the historian Jacob Soll has shown with his study of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the finance minister to the great French king Louis XIV who sought to establish a universal library and state archive because he believed it made a firm foundation for national intelligence.
From Colbert to Borges, and still onward from there: The fascination with completeness is as timeless as it is ingrained. In the last decade, the Internet has made the ambition of universality appear closer to realization than ever before: What is the Web, if not a vast collection, and an accessible one? But as with any new frontier, formidable challenges attend exciting possibilities—and nowhere has this been more apparent than in the efforts of the Digital Public Library of America, a coalition spearheading the largest effort yet to curate and make publicly available the "cultural and scientific heritage of humanity," with a focus on materials from the U.S., by harnessing the Internet's capabilities. The DPLA hopes to create a platform that will orchestrate millions of materials—books from public and university libraries, records from local historical societies, museums, and archives—into a single, user-friendly interface accessible to every American with Internet access. It will launch a prototype in April 2013. If successful, the resource has the potential to revolutionize the way information is organized and found online, to radically expand public access to knowledge, and to represent a sharp counterpoint to the model already offered by search-giant Google, whose "Google Books" program is now eight years old.

Humanities endowment gives $1M for digital library


By BRETT ZONGKER – 
WASHINGTON (AP) — A nonprofit effort to digitize the nation's libraries and create a Digital Public Library of America won a $1 million federal grant Thursday from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The grant will help form a new nonprofit organization and create the technical platform to share digital content across the nation's many public libraries and archives. Digitizing books and building a system for libraries to contribute will take years, though, and millions more dollars from private partners, said endowment chairman Jim Leach.
The project is being spearheaded by Harvard University's library in Cambridge, Mass., with libraries across the country.
An independent board will be formed within two months to establish a new nonprofit organization that will coordinate with statewide library projects with the goal of launching a national prototype by April 2013. Its budget and funding plan are still being developed, though most funding likely will come from outside government, Leach said.
The digital library effort is designed to be free for everyone. It could include partnerships with private groups, such as Google Books, to tap into content that's already digitized. And it has the potential to enhance local libraries with more content beyond their physical walls, Leach added.
"This is a great progression in how knowledge is developed, how it is maintained and spread," he said. "The digital world is probably the greatest democratization in the spread of learning that has ever occurred."
Google's efforts to digitize books have at times been thwarted in court due to copyright laws. Those restrictions may also limit content for a digital public library.
"Copyright laws are very thorny, so one has to work within that dimension," Leach said.
The library effort is meant to complement the World Digital Library project being led by the Library of Congress and international partners. It also will integrate with the European Union's Europeana digital library collection.
Even as more content moves online, physical libraries have seen demand rise in recent years.
"The relevance of libraries appears to be increasing — and that's possibly counterintuitive to what one might think digitization would imply," Leach said. "Libraries are really centers of local culture."
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Digital Public Library of America: http://dp.la