Can We Create a National Digital Library?; New York Review of Books, 10/28/10

Robert Darnton, New York Review of Books; Can We Create a National Digital Library?:

"The following talk was given at the opening of a conference at Harvard on October 1 to discuss the possibility of creating 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."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/28/can-we-create-national-digital-library/