Open Libraries Director: "Everyone should have equal and equitable access to a comprehensive library" - Internet Archive Blogs

"I’m Chris Freeland, I’m a librarian at the Internet Archive and I’m the Director of the Open Libraries Program at the Internet Archive. I’ve been at the Internet Archive for more than two and a half years. Before joining the Archive, I was an associate university librarian at Washington University in St. Louis, and then before that I was the Technical Director of a project called the Biodiversity Heritage Library. And so for more than 15 years, I’ve worked in partnership with the Internet Archive to digitize books and make them as widely available as possible through technology and through copyright.

In that same amount of time, that’s when the Internet Archive was partnering with those one thousand libraries that Brewster just mentioned to digitize nearly four million books. So most of those books, when we were partnering with libraries, most of those books were in the public domain, and that means that those were easily published online. They didn’t need restrictions for use. They didn’t need any kind of controls. But at the Internet Archive, we think that everyone deserves to learn. So our goal is to build a research library with more than four million modern books that we can make available to users all over the world....

So the way that we lend books to our patrons is through Controlled Digital Lending. So Controlled Digital Lending is a legal practice that makes works accessible that are still in copyright. We started working with Controlled Digital Lending with the Boston Public Library, on a pilot that we called at that time “digitize and lend” those books that were in copyright. Now, nine years later, hundreds of other libraries of all sizes in the US and Canada are also participating in Controlled Digital Lending and they’ve embraced the model...."