“For everything that it is possible to read and study on the Internet, there’s still so much out there that’s not online. Of particular interest to students and scholars, are the troves of books and archival materials squirreled away in libraries. And while many libraries (and Google, though its efforts have been bogged down by legal challenges) are building amazing online collections and tools (Alexis Madrigal described those of the New York Public Library here), too often these efforts are happening on a piecemeal, library-by-library, or altogether haphazard basis. An ambitious new project, the Digital Public Library of America, whose website went live yesterday, seeks to centralize and organize this process to build a massive online repository of our cultural and scientific record.”
From Rebecca Rosen’s post on The Atlantic’s website, How to Build the Great Online Library