Robert Darntons Artikel dazu im New York Review of Books (28.10.2010):
Can We Create a National Digital Library?
The purpose of this meeting is to discuss a question of vital importance to the cultural life of our country: Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties of designing it, the legal obstacles to getting it off the ground, the financial costs of constructing and maintaining it, and the political problems of mobilizing support for it. …
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Ein Interview mit Robert Darnton zum Thema im The Chronicle of Higher Education:
One Step Closer to a National Digital Library
Can the nonprofit world create a national digital library to put America’s collective intellectual wealth within everyone’s reach? Robert Darnton, the historian who directs the Harvard University Library, has been one of the most public champions of the idea.
This past weekend, Mr. Darnton convened a group of 42 top-level representatives from foundations, cultural institutions, and the library and scholarly worlds to talk about how to build that library. In a short statement, the group endorsed the idea of “a Digital Public Library of America,” envisioning it as “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources” drawn from the country’s libraries, archives, museums, and universities.
The Chronicle tallked with Mr. Darnton about the discussions and what will happen next. Surprisingly, the biggest obstacle to the Digital Public Library, in his view, is not money but “finding our way through our baroque copyright laws,” especially those that govern so-called orphan works, whose copyright status is unclear. …
Das ganze Interview: