The aim of this program is to increase access to recorded knowledge by encouraging digitization of material in the public domain, assuring public archiving, preservation and open access of this material, and fostering its availability to people everywhere through such technologies as books on demand.

In 2003, Sloan supported the Internet Archive (IA) to enhance its activities in support of preservation and access to digital information, notably, now decade-old recording and availability of past states of the Internet itself. This effort, led by IA founder Brewster Kahle, has been successful. The Internet Archive now houses 86 billion Web pages and continually adds 20 terabytes of data (copies of new and revised Web pages) each month. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine allows people to view archived versions of Web sites by typing in a URL and a date range.

In 2005, Sloan support enabled the Internet Archive to launch an archive of millions of books based on principles of open access to people everywhere.  With this funding, IA initiated an association of participating content providers and supporters of open access. This association, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) , now includes over 50 of the nation’s biggest libraries and research institutions as well as some major IT companies.

Sloan supports the IA-OCA and its membership—which is open to anyone—in the effort to create a universal archive for all forms of recorded knowledge, including film and audio, and to keep this collective digital library open, non-exclusive and non-profit.

In 2006, the Sloan Foundation supported the hiring of staff to facilitate the OCA’s mass digitization of books. To date, the OCA and its member organizations have scanned over 100,000 books and now operate scanning centers in four cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto and London—with new scanning centers planned in an additional five cities during 2007. OCA now scans 3 million pages per month at high resolution (300-600 dpi) which constitutes the state-of-the-art for book scanning.

In December 2006, Sloan again awarded a grant to the Internet Archive-Open Content Alliance: this time to digitize uniquely important collections from five eminent institutions: The John Adams Collection at The Boston Public Library; Historic Art and Art History Books at The Getty Research Institute; The James Birney Collection of Anti-Slavery materials at The Johns Hopkins University Libraries; Museum Publications and related Art images from The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and rare titles within the History of the American West and especially the California Gold Rush from The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

In 2006, Sloan also made a major grant to The Library of Congress to digitize 136,000 public domain books and to develop mass digitization capability for the Library, the world’s largest. This pilot project, the first-ever mass digitization effort at the Library of Congress, aims to demonstrate the feasibility and utility of an OCA-style approach to book scanning and to develop and promulgate standards and protocols for libraries and research institutions across the country.

Digitized material, however open or accessible, needs to be readable. But reading a book from a screen is not feasible or satisfactory for everyone.  In 2004, the foundation supported the development of an on-demand book machine that rapidly and economically prints, trims and binds a library-quality book from a digital input. The developers, On Demand Books, created a prototype, the Espresso Book Machine, that was successfully rolled-out in the summer of 2006 at The World Bank bookstore in Washington DC. It has since printed thousands of books, on demand. A second book machine was sent to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the New Library of Alexandria, Egypt. A third, smaller and more modular machine, is being readied for the New York Public Library in 2007.

The present-generation book machine can produce a 300-page book with a four-color cover in about 4 minutes at a marginal cost of a penny a page.

In 2006, the Sloan Foundation gave the New Orleans Public Library a pilot grant to meld on demand printing technology with OCA-style digital files to help replace Katrina-damaged book inventory at the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library. Eight of the New Orleans Public Library’s thirteen branches were ruined and two thirds of their collection destroyed during the flooding, making the need for replacement books acute.

In addition to rebuilding the New Orleans Public Library collection, the book machine will print public domain titles for the New Orleans public schools—almost all of the New Orleans school libraries were also destroyed by Hurricane Katrina--helping to restock books on the schools’ required reading lists.

The technology now exists for universal access, including bound printing, of all the world’s books.  The potential benefit to humanity is enormous.

The Sloan Foundation’s goal in these endeavors is to foster the building, acceptance and implementation of universal, open access to the world’s most important recorded knowledge.