Thank you, Robert Miller, for 2.5 million Books for Free Public Access

Robert MillerI am both sad and happy that Robert Miller has accepted another position so will be leaving the Internet Archive after 10 years of fantastic achievements. He joined to help create a mass movement of libraries bringing themselves digital by scanning books, microfilm, and other media. He has succeeded in doing this by creating positive relationships and distributed teams, working in 30 libraries in 8 countries, to help libraries go digital.

And thank you to Robert, for building organizational and partnership structures that will continue bring more collections online, long into the future. His endless energy and ability to forge long term relationships to create processes that are both efficient and library-careful have been miraculous to behold. The future looks bright and brighter because of his work.

Working with 1000 contributing libraries, the Internet Archive has digitized and offered free public access to over 2.5 million literary works, we are now on our way to the goal of 10 million books, being served by our sites and the sites of thousands of libraries.

With thousands of libraries serving digital materials in new and different ways to their different communities, we can achieve the diverse but coordinated access and preservation opportunity of our digital age. We look forward to the next steps in the programs that have been started with gusto and relish.

Thank you, Robert. We expect more great things in coming years.

-brewster
Founder, Digital Librarian

5 thoughts on “Thank you, Robert Miller, for 2.5 million Books for Free Public Access

  1. Stacy Argondizzo

    Robert, thank you for being such a visionary for the Archive! You’ve helped us create so many amazing things here. Our goal of building libraries together and creating open access for all, has only just begun. Your passion, persistence and energy will continue to be our guiding force in your absence. Greater things to come, so keep watching us. Much success to you in your new role. Know that you will be greatly missed!

    -Stacy

  2. Frank Lowney

    Given the ongoing redesign effort at archive.org, let me express the hope that the work on texts will also benefit from a sound re-think. As the EPUB 3 standard takes hold, it will be important to accommodate texts that contain rich media and interactive elements, various writing systems and re-flowbility for mobile devices. Fortunately, the code with which to do this is already in hand in the form of the various Radium projects, most especially radium.js. All that needs to happen now is for Archive.org to take up the challenge to use what IDPF has made openly and freely available.
    Scanning texts and presenting page views is so 90s. We can do so much better.

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