Press: How the Digital Public Library of America hopes to build a real public commons

"The Digital Public Library of America is a beautiful idea. Take the physical-to-digital ambition of Google Books and wed it to the civic spirit of the US public library system, providing a centralized portal to a decentralized network of digital media from libraries, museums, universities, archives, and other local, regional, and national collections. Framed in this way, it all seems so logical, so proper, so clear — everything the internet as a public commons promised to be. Surely the messy reality of copyright law, limited local budgets, or the cat-herding that goes into any grand alliance of independent institutions was bound to foul it up somewhere."