Over ten thousand Yiddish texts, estimated as over 1/2 of all the published works in Yiddish, are now online based on the work of the National Yiddish Book Center, volunteers, and the Internet Archive. We are excited that a literature of a people is being made available.

While some of the rights issues may be unclear, this collection has been greeted enthusiastically during the years it was available for print-on-demand. This community may offer a model for how non-profit libraries can support culture online. We would like to see more non-profit libraries offering complete collections to support communities that may be geographically distributed.

The Internet Archive has been working to better support books that read right-to-left, and ease importing of existing digital collections.

Announcement in the New York Times.

Attachment: Online_Yiddish_Library_press_release.pdf