“An American digital public library of over two million books will be in place by next April, according to scholar, author and Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton.
“Professor Darnton, speaking at Columbia Law School earlier this week, made the public promise that the Digital Public Library of America, a non-profit initiative first dreamed up in October 2010, ‘will be up and running by April 2013, and its initial holdings will include at least two million books in the public domain accompanied by a dazzling array of special collections far richer than anything available through Google.’
“With funding from the Sloan Foundation and Arcadia Fund , the Digital Public Library of America counts on its steering committee, a mix of non-profit and foundation leaders, government officials and academic and public library directors.
“Darnton, who represents Harvard, said that the idea behind the library is to make America’s ‘cultural heritage accessible, free of charge, to all of our countrymen and women, in fact to everyone in the world.’”
From Alison Flood’s post on The Guardian, American digital public library promised for 2013