Category Archives: Lending Books

Saving 4 Million Books From Landfill

Posted on by

It’s the classic librarian’s dilemma: Because no library has unlimited storage, every library has to carefully manage its physical collection, and that means removing books to make space for new ones. On one hand, it’s exciting to bring in fresh voices, new stories and modern research, but on the other, a library’s main goal is to preserve information over time. So how can librarians manage their physical collections with an eye towards preservation? 

Since forming a global literacy partnership in 2019, Better World Books (BWB) and the Internet Archive have offered a unique pathway for libraries to ensure that the books they no longer need in their collections can be preserved and made accessible for generations to come. 

The service that BWB provides is an important one for libraries. BWB collects used books from libraries, booksellers, colleges, and universities in six countries, which are then either resold online, donated or recycled. To date, Better World Books has donated over 35 million books worldwide, has raised close to $34 million for libraries and literacy, and has saved more than 450 million books from landfills. Through the partnership with the Internet Archive, BWB has donated more than one million books each year for preservation and digitization, totaling 4 million books to date.

“What we’ve seen is the lifecycle of books become more complete,” says Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. Once books are received from BWB, the Internet Archive digitizes them for patrons with print disabilities, offering readers like Pastor Doug Wilson, who has declining vision, access to books in digital form that are otherwise inaccessible. Then a subset of those books are used for digital lending, interlibrary loan and machine learning.

Dustin Holland, president and chief executive officer of BWB, says the arrangement allows these books to live on and to be put to the best use possible. 

“Our goal has always been to maximize the value of the book,” says Holland. “To have a partner to which BWB may donate books that originate from thousands of libraries across multiple countries is a huge win for us, for the Internet Archive, and for our libraries. At the end of the day, it’s also beneficial for humanity, because there will always be access to these books.”

Supporting Ukrainian students

In May of 2022, BWB partnered with the Internet Archive to help support Ukrainian students and scholars. Customers were invited to contribute $1 with each BWB purchase, raising $17,200 to support the sourcing and digitizing of materials to preserve Ukrainian culture and heritage. This included more than 900 books that will become connected citations on the Ukrainian language Wikipedia page, in addition to more than 17,000 titles that the Internet Archive has already connected through its existing relationship with the Wikipedia community. 

Helping libraries manage their collections

Wolfgram Memorial Library, Widener University-Chester

Since its dedication in 1970, the Wolfgram Memorial Library on the campus of Widener University-Chester in Pennsylvania has actively built a collection of more than 180,000 volumes. Three years ago Roz Goldstein, head of technical services and automated systems, undertook a collection management project to review the library’s holdings and determine which books no longer fit the library’s collection priorities.

The library packed up the older, underutilized books in boxes provided by BWB, which also paid for the shipping. Over the past two years, the library has contributed about 13,000 books to BWB, covering a wide variety of subjects, mostly non-fiction. Goldstein says the library’s main priority was managing collection space, but knowing some will see a broader audience is an added benefit.

“I was thrilled to find out that 600 of our titles have been sent to the Internet Archive to be digitized,” says Goldstein, who has shared her experience with other library colleagues and encouraged them to partner with BWB.

At the SEO Service Center, a branch of the State Library of Ohio, Jay Miley works with 98 libraries as the customer service and library systems manager. In January, he started sifting through 120,000 volumes stored in a central library building to see what no longer fit their collection development priorities. About 20,000 books were moved to local branches due to demand within the system for physical access. Then Miley began to look into options for some lesser-used books — not wanting them to end up in landfill.

Miley discovered BWB was a popular option among other state libraries, and he began to pack up boxes. So far, Ohio has shipped about 12,000 items to BWB and another 38,000 are queued for processing. Recently, he learned that 1,200 of the books that came from his library have been digitized and made available through the Internet Archive. “I think it’s awesome,” he says. “I immediately told my team, my boss and the state librarian.”

A growing impact

Over the past three years, the relationship between Better World Books and the Internet Archive has only grown stronger. BWB has streamlined the logistics of getting materials to the Internet Archive, Holland says, and the impact continues to grow. “The biggest thing we need to do is to educate and shout from the rooftops—to tell more people what we’re doing and how valuable this is for society.”

If your library is interested in learning more about the services that Better World Books provides to libraries, please check out the BWB Services page.

Book Talk: Athena Unbound

Posted on by

Join CHRIS BOURG in conversation with author PETER BALDWIN about the history & promise of the open access movement.

Watch recording:

“In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an admirably pragmatic yet principled approach to the perennial problem of encouraging both the production and distribution of knowledge.” – Paul Romer, Nobel Laureate and University Professor, NYU

Read or purchase Athena Unbound from MIT Press. (Pub date: March 28, 2023)

Open access (OA) could one day put the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips. But the goal of allowing everyone to read everything faces fierce resistance. In Athena Unbound, Peter Baldwin offers an up-to-date look at the ideals and history behind OA, and unpacks the controversies that arise when the dream of limitless information slams into entrenched interests in favor of the status quo. In addition to providing a clear analysis of the debates, Baldwin focuses on thorny issues such as copyright and ways to pay for “free” knowledge. He also provides a roadmap that would make OA economically viable and, as a result, advance one of humanity’s age-old ambitions.

Baldwin addresses the arguments in terms of disseminating scientific research, the history of intellectual property and copyright, and the development of the university and research establishment. As he notes, the hard sciences have already created a funding model that increasingly provides open access, but at the cost of crowding out the humanities. Baldwin proposes a new system that would shift costs from consumers to producers and free scholarly knowledge from the paywalls and institutional barriers that keep it from much of the world.

Rich in detail and free of jargon, Athena Unbound is an essential primer on the state of the global open access movement.

About our speakers

PETER BALDWIN is Professor of History at UCLA, and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. His recent books are Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State across History (MIT Press); Fighting the First Wave: Why the Coronavirus Was Tackled So Differently across the Globe; and The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle. He serves on the boards of the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Wikimedia Endowment, the Central European University, the Danish Institute of Advanced Studies, and as chair of the Board of the Center for Jewish History. His journalistic writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Newsweek, New Republic, Huffington Post, Der Spiegel, Berliner Zeitung, Publishers Weekly, American Interest, Chronicle of Higher Education, Prospect, American Interest, and Zocalo Public Square.

CHRIS BOURG is the Director of Libraries at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she also has oversight of the MIT Press. She is also the founding director of the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS). Prior to assuming her role at MIT, Chris worked for 12 years in the Stanford University Libraries. Before Stanford, she spent 10 years as an active-duty U.S. Army officer, including three years on the faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She received her BA from Duke University, her MA from the University of Maryland, and her MA and Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford.

Book Talk: Athena Unbound
March 28 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET

Punctum Books Helps Build Streamlined System for Archiving Open Access Monographs

Posted on by

Since its founding in 2011, punctum books has been an independent, scholar- and queerled open access (OA) press committed to reshaping the way knowledge production is shared in academia and beyond. 

Now, it is also a key player in the development of technology that’s making it easier for publishers to archive open access monographs. 

The idea behind the open access movement is that scholarly research is a public good that should be made available to everyone in order to remove some of the technological and financial barriers to research and to accelerate education and research across the planet. Open access monographs are long-form scholarly publications released in the public domain under a Creative Commons or comparable license, which allows readers to freely access them without paywall. Authors of open access publications retain the copyright to their work.

“We strongly believe that publicly funded knowledge should be publicly available.”

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, co-director of punctum books

“We strongly believe that publicly funded knowledge should be publicly available,” said Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, co-director of the non-profit publisher, along with Eileen A. Fradenburg Joy. “This is an ideological commitment — and, for us, this has been a guiding light in all our publishing work.” 

Recently, punctum published its entire catalogue of close to 400 books to the Internet Archive’s online collection. It includes books about queer studies, film and media studies, Anthropocene studies, recuperative work and titles dealing with the Medieval period. 

Streamlining open access publishing

Not only did the publisher make its items freely available, it was also part of an effort to develop an open metadata management and dissemination system – known as Thoth – to encourage other open access publishers to do the same. 

The automated deposit system was built as part of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access book publishers and infrastructure providers. The open source platform, funded by Arcadia and Research England, is designed to streamline the sharing of open access books.

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, co-director, punctum books

“We wanted to make the management of metadata more convenient, especially for small-scale publishers,” Van Gerven Oei said. “The systems to get digital publications into the world are very opaque and difficult to navigate. We developed a tool that makes everything easier. We hope that by offering this service the discoverability of open access books will be much better.”

Along with punctum, other scholar-led, open access publishers such as Open Book Publishers are using Thoth for their daily metadata management. Van Gerven Oei said there is never going to be one single solution to the distribution challenge for small open publishers, but he hopes this effort will redirect traffic to the Archive.

“The Internet Archive, as a central repository not only for publications, but for the entire history of the internet, is of vital importance,” Van Gerven Oei said. “I am happy that the Internet Archive is one of the first repositories connected to our work with Thoth.” 

In addition, punctum is working with other libraries to develop open community-owned infrastructure to offer an alternative to commercial publishing infrastructures. 

See recent COPIM blog post about the experimentation with automated archiving at Internet Archive.

“We see libraries as our allies in our fight for open knowledge,” Van Gerven Oei said. “Knowledge is a public good that should not be a private enterprise at all.”

The Library-Publisher partnership

The founders of punctum believe the press has a moral obligation to provide its materials for free and allow authors to share, remix, and reuse. 

Incorporated and based in Santa Barbara, California, punctum has a partnership with the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library. 

The UC Santa Barbara Library. Photo credit: UC SANTA BARBARA

Together, they conducted a two-year pilot project from 2018-2020 to test a no-fees open access book publishing model for the humanities and social sciences. 

“The goal was to develop best practices, protocols and infrastructure, technical and otherwise, around punctum’s digital catalog, and create a Library Membership Program,” said Lidia Uziel, associate university librarian for research resources and scholarly communication at UCSB Library. The objective was to support punctum’s operations while advancing the library’s interest in no-fee OA book publishing.  

Lidia Uziel, associate university librarian, UCSB Library

“It was a natural collaboration for the library,” said Uziel. “The University of California, Santa Barbara is very committed to opening up scholarship created by UCSB researchers to be freely available to the scholarly community globally. Making good on this commitment requires the investment of time, effort, and money toward transforming the current, very closed, scholarly publishing system for both journals and books.”

Many faculty members publish with punctum, because of shared values. UCSB community and punctum are both passionately committed to the mission of the public research library and to scholar-led, community-owned, and economically sustainable open science and publishing. The project was an opportunity for the library community, students, and faculty to learn about open access publishing through the lens of the pilot project and the partnership with punctum.

“Making good on [a commitment to open access] requires the investment of time, effort, and money toward transforming the current, very closed, scholarly publishing system for both journals and books.”

Lidia Uziel, associate university librarian, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library

The relationship was mutually beneficial, as it was also a chance for punctum to broaden its distribution network.

“The partnership with UCSB has been a lifesaver,” Van Gerven Oei said. ”To get books out into the world – from publisher to readers – it’s not easy. UCSB Library helped us in understanding the landscape, finding allies, and getting metadata records in shape. In turn, we have provided students and faculty with knowledge of OA publishing.”

One of the outcomes of the pilot was the creation of punctum’s Supporting Library Membership Program.  It now works with other libraries around the world on open access publishing.

“The library and scholarly communities have long advocated for free and unrestricted access to scholarly literature. The open science movement as a whole is gaining momentum, not only in the U.S., but also internationally,” Uziel said. “Open access publishing will continue to grow thanks to the implementation of OA policies by funders and institutions and the development of new innovative publishing models and open source platforms that facilitate the publication of OA content at a reduced cost. National and international library organizations are endorsing the OA policies and initiatives, and open access publishing is increasingly integrated into standard library operations.”

The road ahead

Experimentation on how to disseminate born digital books is happening across all sectors of publishing, with efforts like punctum books helping make systemic change across a field that has historically prioritized commerce over access, according to Maria Bustillos, editor of The Brick House.

“Free-thinking people are all involved in the same democratic, egalitarian project of building culture, whether they are librarians, academics, readers, students, journalists, artists or authors,” she said. “The sooner we all join forces to expand and protect the global commons, the better our world will be.”

Van Gerven Oei said he’s optimistic about the future of open access, but there needs to be policy and political will to support knowledge as a public good. In the meantime, he sees potential with providing online access to open access monographs. 

“We have a deep understanding and love for all the forms of archives,” Van Gerven Oei said. “From the moment that the Internet Archive existed, we have been great fans of its omnivorous drive and applaud the enterprise. We are very happy to contribute even more data and become sustenance for future archivists.”

How do you use the Internet Archive in your research?

Posted on by

Tell us about your research & how you use the Internet Archive to further it! We are gathering testimonials about how our library & collections are used in different research projects & settings.

From using our books to check citations to doing large-scale data analysis using our web archives, we want to hear from you!

Share your story now!

Book Talk: History, Disrupted

Posted on by

Join journalist CLAIRE WOODCOCK and author JASON STEINHAUER for a free, virtual discussion about how social media & the web have changed the past.

REGISTER NOW

The Internet has changed the past. Social media, Wikipedia, mobile networks, and the viral and visual nature of the Web have filled the public sphere with historical information and misinformation, changing what we know about our history. This is the first book to chronicle how and why it matters.

Purchase History, Disrupted from Better World Books.

From Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to artificial intelligence, machine learning and algorithms, history has been widely communicated and fiercely contested across the social Web as battles over the 1619 Project, the Trump presidency, Confederate monuments and history textbooks have exploded into public view. How does history intersect with today’s most pressing debates? How does history contribute to online debates about misinformation, disinformation, journalism, tribalism, activism, democracy, politics and identity?

In the midst of growing political division around the world, this information is critical to an engaged citizenry. As we collectively grapple with the effects of technology and its capacity to destabilize our societies, scholars, educators and the general public should be aware of how the Web and social media shape what we know about ourselves – and crucially, about our past.

REGISTER NOW

JASON STEINHAUER is a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center in the USA. He is the founder and host of History Club on Clubhouse with more than 100,000 followers, and was the Founding Director of the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University, USA, from 2017 – 2020.  A public historian with over twenty years of experience in major cultural and historical institutions in the US, Steinhauer is the Founder of the History Communication Institute and the creator of the field of History Communication, which examines how history gets communicated on the World Wide Web. He has written for CNN, TIME, The Washington Post, Poynter, Inside Higher Ed, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Foreign Policy Research Institute (where he is a Senior Fellow). He has also delivered lectures overseas on behalf of the US Department of State, created a history podcast for the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and appeared on C-SPAN’s American History TV.

CLAIRE WOODCOCK is an independent journalist based in Colorado. Her work has appeared in Motherboard Vice, NPR, Literary Hub, Aspen Public Radio, Boulder Weekly and many other publications. Her current work focuses on the politics of information in libraries. Woodcock graduated with a B.A. in English Literature from the University of New York at Fredonia in 2015 and is currently an M.A. candidate in the Media & Public Engagement program at CU Boulder. Woodcock is also a Digital Ownership Fellow with NYU Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Policy and Law, researching the digital book marketplace.

BOOK TALK: History, Disrupted
March 9 @ 10am PT / 1pm ET
Register now for the free virtual discussion

2022 Empowering Libraries Year in Review

Posted on by

The Internet Archive launched the Empowering Libraries campaign in 2020 to defend equal access to library services for all. Since then, threats to libraries have only grown, so our fight continues. As 2022 draws to a close, here’s a look back through some of our library’s milestones and accomplishments over the year.

In the news

  • When the war in Ukraine started, volunteers began using the Wayback Machine and other online tools to preserve Ukrainian websites and digital collections. The effort, Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), now has more than 1,500 volunteers working to preserve more than 5,000 web sites and 50TB of data. 
    • Watch a compelling story about SUCHO from CBS News featuring Quinn Dombrowski, one of the project leaders from Stanford University, and Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine.
    • In May, we partnered with Better World Books on a book drive supporting Ukrainian scholars. BWB customers were able to donate $1 at checkout to acquire books cited in the Ukrainian-language Wikipedia for the Internet Archive to preserve, digitize, and link to citations in Wikipedia.
  • In October, we introduced Democracy’s Library, a free, open, online compendium of government research and publications from around the world. We hosted an in-person celebration that highlighted the critical importance of free and open access to government publications, and have continued framing out what Democracy’s Library is and why it’s necessary.
  • Internet Archive Canada opened its new headquarters in Vancouver, BC, alongside the Association of Canadian Archivists 2022 Conference.
  • More than 1,000 authors have spoken out on behalf of libraries, demanding that publishers and trade associations put the digital rights of librarians, readers, and authors ahead of shareholder profits. 
  • In a tumultuous year on social media, Internet Archive has added a Mastodon server. Why? We need a game with many winners, not just a few powerful players.
  • In an OpEd for TIME, Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, warned, “the instability occasioned by Twitter’s change in ownership has revealed an underlying instability in our digital information ecosystem.”

The internet reacts to the lawsuit against our library

  • On July 7, 2022, the Internet Archive filed a motion for summary judgment, asking a federal judge to rule in our favor and end a radical lawsuit, filed by four major publishing companies, that aims to criminalize library lending. Check out the Hachette v. Internet Archive page at EFF for all filings and resources.
  • We hosted a press conference on July 8 about the lawsuit featuring statements from Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) and Corynne McSherry (EFF), plus powerful impact statements from medical school librarian Benjamin Saracco and author and editor Tom Scocca.
  • Interest in the lawsuit crossed over into mainstream channels following a viral tweet about the filing, which kicked off a lengthy online conversation about library rights, digital lending and digital ownership.
  • After a series of standard filings across the summer and early fall, on October 8, Internet Archive filed the final brief in support of our motion for summary judgment, asking the Court to dismiss the lawsuit because our lending program is a fair use.
  • What does the lawsuit mean for the future of libraries? Internet Archive’s policy counsel, Peter Routhier, considers how the publishers view libraries based on their filings.
  • Check out the Hachette v. Internet Archive page at EFF for all filings and resources.
  • One message really resonated online—people were surprised to learn that the Internet Archive has a physical archive that preserves all the physical books we’ve acquired and digitized. 

eBooks, #OwnBooks & digital ownership

  • 2022 might go down as the year that people started to really understand what it means when libraries & individuals can no longer own content, like when streaming-only content vanishes from media platforms.
  • Musician Max Collins wrote in Popula how “owning media is now an act of countercultural defiance,” walking readers through his first-hand example of how the streaming model doesn’t work for artists, only corporations.
  • Brewster Kahle published, “Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books,” countering the notion put forward by publishers that ebooks don’t wear out. In fact, Brewster notes that ebooks require “constant maintenance—reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read.”
  • Brewster’s post sparked the interest of LA Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik, who expanded on the issues around digital ownership in “Here’s why you can’t ‘own’ your ebooks.”
  • To celebrate why it’s important to own books, and to help bring visibility to issues around digital ownership, we launched the participatory #OwnBooks campaign, which invited people to share photos with the oldest book, or most treasured volume, from their personal collection, like this signed copy of The Phantom Tollbooth.
  • Author Glyn Moody published his latest book, Walled Culture, as a free ebook that you can download and own, or as a physical book that you can purchase in print.
  • More publishers joined the movement to sell—not license—ebooks to libraries, including independent publisher 11:11 Press.

The future of libraries

  • In February, we launched Library as Laboratory, a new series exploring the computational use of Internet Archive collections. The series included segments from digital humanities scholars, computational scientists, web archiving professionals and other researchers.
  • To help librarians and other information professionals better understand the decentralized web, Internet Archive partnered with the Metropolitan New York Library Council, DWeb, and Library Futures for a six-part series, Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web. 
  • During this year’s National Library Week, we invited readers to Meet the Librarians who work at the Internet Archive, highlighting the new roles our librarians lead in support of our mission, “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
  • Internet Archive joined with Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation and others in the Movement for a Better Internet, a collaborative effort to ensure that the internet’s evolution is guided by public interest values.
  • Lila Bailey, Internet Archive’s senior policy fellow, and Michael Menna, policy fellow from Stanford University, released their report,”Securing Digital Rights for Libraries: Towards an Affirmative Policy Agenda for a Better Internet,” regarding libraries’ role in shaping the next iteration of the internet. 

Milestones

  • Dave Hansen, one of the authors of the white paper on controlled digital lending, was named the new executive director of Authors Alliance.
  • Carl Malamud received this year’s Internet Archive Hero Award for his lifelong mission to make public information freely available to the public.
  • We hosted the first in-person Library Leaders Forum in three years, preceded by a virtual Forum that brought together hundreds of digital library enthusiasts to explore issues related to digital ownership and the future of library collections.
  • We hosted a joint webinar with OCLC about our resource sharing pilots, including how to request articles from the Internet Archive via interlibrary loan.
  • The Music Library Association made its publications openly available at Internet Archive.
  • We began gathering content to support the newly announced Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), and then quickly surpassed 25,000 items in the collection.
  • DISCMASTER, a new software tool, allows users to search across the contents of the tens of thousands of archived CD-ROMs at the Internet Archive.
  • In August we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Live Music Archive with a historical tour of the effort, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of live sets available for listening at archive.org.

Donations

  • Colgate University donated more than 1.5 million microfiche cards for preservation and digitization, covering topics including Census data, documents from the Department of Education, Congressional testimony, CIA documents, and foreign news translated into English.
  • Facing an uncertain future, Hong Kong bookstore owner Albert Wan closed his pro-democracy, independent bookstore and donated the books to the Internet Archive for preservation and digitization.
  • Do you have physical collections you’d like to donate to the Internet Archive? Check out our help document.

Book talks

Tips for requesting articles from Internet Archive on OCLC’s resource sharing network

Posted on by

On November 9, Internet Archive participated in a webinar hosted by OCLC that showed librarians how to request articles from our library using OCLC tools.

The Recording and Slides (PDF download) from the event are now available.

How do I request articles from the Internet Archive?

  1. To learn how, watch the recording—starting at timestamp 12:25 minutes—and view slides 21- 30 (PDF).
    1. Create/update your custom holdings to include IAILL in the group you use for copy requesting.
      1. Learn more about how to set up custom holding groups and custom holding paths.
      2. Send copy requests to the Custom Holdings Path including IAILL using Automated Request Manager.
    2. If you have Tipasa, add IAILL to your group of Proven Senders.
    3. If you have ILLiad, make IAILL an Odyssey Trusted Sender.
    4. If Internet Archive indicates that they own the year/volume you need, you can simply add IAILL to your lender string.
      1. From the Holdings page, filter to the article date you need, select the custom holdings path including IAILL, and click go to populate the lender string.
  2. Have questions about how to set up your custom holdings groups and paths? Please contact OCLC Support.  

Key facts about the Internet Archive

  1. Internet Archive’s OCLC symbol: IAILL
  2. Internet Archive supplies for FREE
  3. Internet Archive is fast—and deliver in an average of 37 minutes
  4. Articles delivered electronically through Article Exchange
  5. All PDFs are provided with full OCR (Optical Character Recognition) 

Questions?

Library Leaders Forum Recap

Posted on by

This year’s Library Leaders Forum kicked off on October 12 with news of promising research, digitization projects and advocacy efforts designed to best shape the library of the future.

The virtual gathering also called on participants to take action in sharing resources and promoting a variety of public interest initiatives underway in the library community.

Watch session recording:

Chris Freeland, director of Open Libraries, moderated the first event of the 2022 forum with librarians, policy experts, publishers and authors. (A complete recording of the virtual session is available here) The second session will take place Oct. 19, live in San Francisco and via Zoom starting at 7 p.m. PT. (Registration is still open).

Libraries have a vital role to play in educating citizens, combating misinformation and preserving materials that the public can use to hold officials accountable. To help meet those challenges, Internet Archive Founder Brewster Kahle gave a preview of a new project: Democracy’s Library. The vision is to establish a free, open, online compendium of government research and publications from around the world.

“We have the big opportunity to help inform users of the internet and bring as good information to them as possible to help them understand their world,” said Kahle, who will launch the initiative next week and invited others to join in the effort. “We need your input and partnership.”

The virtual forum covered the latest on Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), the library practice that is growing in popularity in the wake of pandemic closures when physical collections were unavailable to the public. Freeland announced the 90th library recently joined the Open Libraries program, which embraces CDL as the digital equivalent of traditional library lending, allowing patrons to borrow one copy at a time of a title the library owns.

As librarians look for ways of safeguarding digital books, Readium LCP was highlighted as a promising, open source technology gaining popularity. Participants were encouraged in this same space to spread the word about the advocacy work of the nonprofit Library Futures, and recognize many authors who have recently offered public support for libraries, CDL and digital ownership of books.

Lila Bailey reported on an emerging coalition of nonprofits working on a policy agenda to build a better internet centered on public interest values. A forthcoming paper will outline four digital library rights that without which it would be impossible to function in the 21st century. They include the right to collect, preserve, lend and access material. This encouraging collaboration is the result of two convenings earlier this year, including one in Washington, D.C. in July.

CDL Community of Practice

A panel at the forum discussed projects within the CDL community of practice.

Nettie Lagace of the National Information Standards Organization gave an update on an initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, to create a consensus framework and recommendations on CDL. Working groups are focused now on considering digital objects, circulation and reserves, interlibrary loans and asset sharing. Public comments on the draft will be welcome in the coming months, with a final document likely released next summer.

Amanda Wakaruk a copyright and scholarly communications librarian at the University of Alberta, announced a new paper exploring the legal considerations of CDL for Canadian libraries. She is one of the co-authors on the research, along with others in the Canadian Federation of Library Associations. The preprint is available now and the final paper will be published soon in the journal, Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

Working with Project ReShare, the Boston Library Consortium is leveraging CDL as a mechanism for interlibrary loan. “BLC really believes that CDL is an extension of existing resource sharing practices, both in the legal sense–the same protections and opportunities afforded to interlibrary loan also apply to CDL,” said Charlie Bartow, executive director, “but, also in a services sense–that existing resource sharing systems and practices can be readily adapted to include CDL.”

Also, speaking in the session was Caltech’s Mike Hucka. He described efforts on his campus to provide students with learning materials when the pandemic hit by creating a simple model they named the Digital Borrowing System (DIBS).

In Canada, a large digitization project is underway at the University of Toronto, where 40,000 titles in the library’s government collection are being scanned and made available online for easier public access.

Take action

In the final segment, Freeland announced that Carl Malamud is the recipient of the 2022 Internet Archive Hero Award for his dedication in making government information accessible to all. Malamud will receive the Hero Award onstage at next week’s evening celebration, “Building Democracy’s Library.”

Freeland concluded the event with a final call to action: To join the #OwnBooks campaign. People are encouraged to take a photo of themselves holding a book they own that has special meaning, perhaps something that has influenced their career path or has sentimental value. As the Internet Archive fights for the right for libraries to own books, this is a chance to bring attention to the issue and build public support.

New eBook Protection Software Gaining Popularity Among Publishers and Libraries

Posted on by

A new digital rights management (DRM) technology that is open source—and embraced by publishers—is gaining traction in the library eBook world. 

Readium LCP was developed five years ago to protect digital files from unauthorized distribution. Unlike proprietary platforms, the technology is open to anyone who wants to look inside the codebase and make improvements. It is a promising alternative for libraries and users wanting to avoid the limitations of traditional DRM. 

“It’s important to have a decentralized, open source system for lending and vending eBooks,” said Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive founder. “LCP is a new generation of software protection that is proving popular with both libraries and publishers.” 

LCP is a flexible, vendor-neutral, low-cost solution against over-sharing of content for eBooks, as well as audiobooks. The codebase is open source with the exception of an algorithm that protects the files.

“LCP was developed in conjunction with publishers to make sure it would meet their criteria to safeguard the content of their books,” said Brenton Cheng, senior engineer at the Internet Archive. “Yet, it’s an open format, and not tied to one particular company or commercial entity. In that spirit of openness, it’s available to anyone who wants to protect their content.” 

A number of leading publishers, libraries and book distributors have adopted LCP, including:

  • HarperCollins integrated LCP into its Harlequin Plus subscription service. 
  • Academic publisher John Libbey Eurotext has adopted LCP for its 2022 publications.
  • Stockholm Public Library has incorporated LCP into its Bibblix mobile app for young readers.
  • Numilog has deployed LCP for more than 500,000 eBooks in French & English.
  • BiblioVault adopted LCP in 2021, serving more than 90 scholarly presses & 40,000 books.
  • The Palace Project has integrated LCP into its mobile apps.

Source: LCP adopters

It’s a simple system that allows readers to access eBooks and audiobooks—and does not limit the selection of titles from a single source (as with Amazon or Apple). 

It offers a large freedom in the choice of a reading solution, keeps intact the accessibility of digital publications and does not leak personal data, says Laurent Le Meur, chief technology officer, with EDRLab, the open source software development laboratory which develops LCP and receives funding from publishers, eBooks distributors, libraries and public bodies.

With LCP’s structure, there is no need to go through a third-party source to be authorized to download a protected book. Therefore, there is no threat of personal information being compromised. LCP is interoperable by design and socially engineered to be a sustainable, nonprofit DRM solution. 

“Open source technologies like LCP protect authors and their works,” said Maria Bustillos, editor at The Brick House Cooperative, a publishing platform designed, owned and operated by journalists. “As a publisher committed to preserving traditional library rights, The Brick House looks forward to exploring the integration of LCP into our forthcoming projects.”

As a new technology, LCP is being used around the world with Europe and Canada leading the way. For organizations working on accessibility, LCP is the natural solution they have been waiting for, said Le Meur. In 2025, the EU Accessibility act will require all distributors of digital publications to offer accessible services and LCP is a DRM format that complies with the mandate. 

“LCP is appealing because it’s not locked,” Cheng said. “There’s a greater sense that it might last. It has more transparency and accountability because the source code is out there and available for anyone to see.”

Image by Freepik

New additions to the Internet Archive for July 2022

Posted on by

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items. 

Notable new collections from our patrons: 

Books – 78,091 New items in July

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

1000 classic recipes
Camera : a history of photography from daguerreotype to digital
Canadian dinosaurs

Audio Archive – 91,636 New Items in July

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.

Goose Live at Radio City Music Hall on 2022-06-24

LibriVox Audiobooks – 119 New Items in July

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

The Gray Phantom’s Return
The Mask of Death
The Wind in the Willows (Version 7 Dramatic Reading)

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 8,888 New Items in July

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Anselmi Giuseppe – Delta TQD 3047 (1907-1909)
D’ Assy Pierre – Discophilia DIS 376 (1908-09)

Live Music Archive – 965 New Items in July

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.

Movies – 135 New Items in July

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.