New York Public Library Receives $12.5 Million Grant From Arcadia Fund For Open Access Project

From the NYPL:

The New York Public Library (NYPL) has received a $12.5 million grant from Arcadia a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Library Trustee Peter Baldwin, towards a significant investment in the Library’s digital transformation. The grant will support the Library’s efforts to improve patrons’ ability to discover, request, and access in digital format, a copy of almo st any book through its online platform. Since 2013, Arcadia has awarded $19 million to the NYPL for projects that provide open access to research and scholarly materials.

The grant also allows the Library to make important investments in technology, accessibility improvements, and the development of new policies and agreements to support partnerships and collaboration with libraries around the world. The new grant builds upon the Library’s recent work to create a universally available catalog for digitized research books and reinforces its goal to provide free and equitable access to knowledge and information.

During the first weeks of the COVID-19 shut down, the Library rapidly launched a new collections interface, Digital Research Books BETA, which allowed readers and researchers instant access to digitized materials that had previously been distributed across collections in multiple locations. This project, supported by a previous grant from Arcadia Fund, vastly increased the scholarly publications and research books made available to the public by the Library, and also identified an array of challenges related to the use of different editions  and formats that require additional consideration, solutions and support. The new grant will tackle these issues and identify opportunities for the future.

See Also: New York Public Library (NYPL) and LYRASIS Announce Next Steps in National E-Book Collaboration (June 11, 2021)

See Also: GLAM: Creative Commons Receives $5M Grant from Arcadia to Advance Open Access at Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (June 3, 2021)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, Public Libraries