“By drawing on databases that already exist and that contain millions of books from the public domain, we can lay a firm foundation for the DPLA and build incrementally from there. Of course, cultural artifacts of all sorts could be built into that structure from the beginning. Most of them will be ‘born digital,’ like the people who will consult them— ‘digital natives’ at home in a digital future that we can barely imagine but that we must prepare by making the cultural heritage of humanity freely accessible to all.”
From Joseph Raben’s response to Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books, “Digital Democratic Vistas”