Librarians Share Benefits of Controlled Digital Lending

Librarians and advocates gathered in the Hart Senate Building to talk to policymakers about Controlled Digital Lending

This summer, representatives from the Internet Archive joined librarians and advocates in Washington D.C., to talk with  policymakers about how Controlled Digital Lending, or CDL, helps their communities. The resounding response from Congressional offices was that CDL “just makes sense” and they want to support libraries that embrace technology to fulfill their public service missions.

As technology advances, so too does the ability to lend books efficiently, easily, and broadly, specifically with CDL. With CDL, a library digitizes a book it owns and lends out one secured digital version to one user at a time. It is the digital equivalent of traditional lending. CDL is not intended to replace or circumvent a library’s existing e-book subscriptions but instead serves as a powerful tool for bridging the gap between print and electronic resources for readers and researchers alike.

Lisa Weaver, Jim Michalko, Michael Blackwell, Tom Blake, Lila Bailey and Michelle Wu

Through powerful stories, librarians explained that CDL is benefiting specific communities by:

  • Providing access to rural patrons who find it challenging to physically check out a book;
  • Protecting materials from damage in natural disasters from fire to floods;   
  • Saving the cost of transporting books to other branches to be loaned;
  • Allowing access to rare, fragile books or those out of print and not in circulation;
  • Preserving vulnerable cultural heritage materials for indigenous people;    
  • Supplementing materials at K-12 and university libraries that are suffering budget cuts;
  • Providing historical context and fighting misinformation online; and
  • Increasing access for people with disabilities, the elderly and students in off hours.
Dave Hansen, Meredith Rose, Mark Malonzo, Mary Minow, Kyle K. Courtney, Chris Freeland and Michael Colford

The concluding message to Congress was that libraries are using CDL today and communities and librarians love it.  We were told that Congress wants to hear more. To tell your story of how CDL has helped your community (e.g., did you find the genealogy you were looking  for or the book you needed for a school project?) and why you love CDL, leave a comment below or contact lila at archive dot org.

15 thoughts on “Librarians Share Benefits of Controlled Digital Lending

  1. Corbax

    The rise of e-books offers libraries a potential way to expand their collections and offer their users a modern lending service adapted to the digital age. Libraries lent more than 274 million digital books in 2018, the highest growth rate since 2015.

    The CDL system allows a library to distribute digital copies of a book in exactly the same way as it would distribute physical media. If the library has a digital copy of a book, you can lend that copy to only one user at a time. If a library has three copies of a physical book and digitizes one of them, it can distribute two physical copies and one digital one. That is, libraries only circulate the exact number of copies of a work available to them. Physical copies of books that are loaned digitally must be removed from the circulation through the library while the digital copy is in the hands of a user. The objective of this system is to guarantee the acquisition of the works in a legal way. Therefore, the main benefit of this system is the digitization of books that are currently not offered in electronic format and expand the scope of these.

    The way in which users access digital or digitized books has changed and we must support the CDL system so that accessibility to books and therefore to culture is increasing but respecting the rights of authors and publishers.

  2. Pingback: Roundup (August 9, 2019) | LJ infoDOCKET

  3. Pingback: Roundup (August 12, 2019) | LJ infoDOCKET

  4. Teacher Tutor

    Always happy to see education at the forefront. My son carries a backpack full of books every day to high school at a time when all that data could be easily carried on a jump drive.

  5. Michael Stevens

    Why are we getting the message: “This book is not available at this time.
    Its access has been restricted. Browse our lendable books”? There are now thousands of books that are now not accessible. What is going to happen to them? Will we be able to access them in the future? Please could you get back to me, i can not find any information on what is going on. Thank You. Michael Stevens.

  6. keodangachvn.com

    I really like this article
    Through powerful stories, librarians explained that CDL is benefiting specific communities by:

    Providing access to rural patrons who find it challenging to physically check out a book;
    Protecting materials from damage in natural disasters from fire to floods;
    Saving the cost of transporting books to other branches to be loaned;
    Allowing access to rare, fragile books or those out of print and not in circulation;
    Preserving vulnerable cultural heritage materials for indigenous people;
    Supplementing materials at K-12 and university libraries that are suffering budget cuts;
    Providing historical context and fighting misinformation online; and
    Increasing access for people with disabilities, the elderly and students in off hours.

Comments are closed.