Electronic libraries: American digital public library promised for April 2013

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.

The DPLA steering committee is currently wrestling with the issue of copyright – the same problem which Google ran into over its controversial plans to digitise millions of books for Google Book Search, eventually getting sued by authors and publishers for infringement.

The DPLA, a non-profit organisation "devoted to the public good", must accommodate "the legitimate interests of the book industry" as it seeks to include books covered by copyright in its collection while avoiding "ruinous litigation". His own suggestion was to steer clear of books which have just been published, instead creating "a moving wall" of five or 10 years between the library's collection and books which are in print, which would advance a year at a time. "Most books cease to sell after a few weeks, and their potential to produce revenue dries up completely within a few years," he said. "The rare book that maintains its commercial value over a long time could be excluded from the DPLA by an opt-out arrangement with the publisher and author. Far from threatening the economic interests of rights holders, the DPLA might in this way win their cooperation."