Brewster Kahle
Founder & Digital Librarian
Internet Archive
Tom Blake
Digital Projects Manager
Boston Public Library
Geoffrey Harder
Associate University Librarian Information Resources
University of Alberta
Today, people expect to get their information online, yet much of modern knowledge still exists only on the printed page, stored in libraries. Libraries have been challenged to meet this digital demand, stymied by costs, e-book restrictions, policy risks, and missing infrastructure. We now have the technology and legal frameworks to transform our library system by 2020. The Internet Archive, working with library, archive and museum partners, proposes bringing modern books online, through purchase or digitization. Our plan includes at-scale circulation of these e-books, enabling libraries owning the physical works to make lendable digital copies available to their patrons. This session will provide an overview of the five-year pilot of this model, conducted with the cooperation of 100+ libraries, making 540,000 modern works available for lending through the Open Library platform. It will include a description of the technology now in the pipeline to bring this effort to scale, as well as an overview of the current efforts to create a collaborative digital collection of modern works.
