Harvard Crimson: "Harvard Leads Digital Library Initiative"

From the Harvard Crimson:

Guided by a Steering Committee at the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the project remains in its initial planning phase. But in the wake of a New York District Court’s ruling last month against the Google Books Library Project, citing concerns of monopoly power, the spotlight has fallen on the DPLA, which will allow free access to the volumes.

There is a “need to pivot very quickly from the discussion phase to the implementation phase,” said Harvard Law Professor John G. Palfrey ’94, a co-director of the Berkman Center and a leader in the DPLA project.

The DPLA will be the product of a collaboration between the largest library systems in the nation, already including Harvard, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution.

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Paul N. Courant, a member of the steering committee and a professor at the University of Michigan, said that he thought “success over some period is almost inevitable.”

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“There is a sense that we ought to do things relatively quickly,” Courant said. “I think we should make substantial progress by this calendar year.”

Once the proposal goes into implementation phase, the Steering Committee must scan a large number of printed materials, negotiate with various publishers on copyright protected materials, and deal with a multi-million dollar annual operating budget.

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