The Internet Archive, supported by previous Foundation grants, has become a leader in storing and preserving a historical record of the entire Internet and World Wide Web. It was a 2005 grant that supported the Archive to begin scanning books toward an open-access digital library. Later that year, it created the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a coordinating group for the creation of such a library. OCA now includes over 30 major libraries holding some 160 million volumes, as well as major search engines (by Yahoo and Microsoft Network), technology companies (Adobe and Xerox), a commercial publisher (O'Reilly Media, Inc.), and a major not-for-profit membership organization of over 150 institutions, including universities, research libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies, devoted to improving access to information that supports research and learning (RLG, the Research Libraries Group, Inc., newly combined in 2006 with OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center). Unlike Google, OCA supports an open-access, non-proprietary online library in which no single entity can exercise exclusive control. The general goal is to make knowledge, to the extent allowed by law, available and accessible to all, with accessible meaning freely viewable, downloadable, shareable, printable, indexable, and navigable. The first of the above grants (made in May 2006) enables the Archive to capitalize on fast-moving developments by adding a hands-on, day-to-day executive director for public advocacy, fundraising, and development of new partnerships, and by engaging an OCA curator of books to function as an internal administrator, coordinating the activities of OCA's six working groups. These staff additions and additional program refinements will allow OCA more effectively to carry forward and accelerate the pace of its work to create and grow an open, online digital library.

To date, OCA has established scanning centers in four cities and expects to add five more centers in 2007. It is now scanning at the rate of roughly 10,000 books per month. The second of the above grants (made in December 2006) supports the strengthening of the open access approach to recorded knowledge by funding OCA to digitize select high-profile collections of books and other special research materials from five world-class institutions. These include: the John Adams Collection at the Boston Public Library; the History of Art and Architecture Collection at the Getty Research Institute; both new and previously digitized publications from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, along with several thousand key images of works from the collection; the James Birney Anti-Slavery Collection from The Johns Hopkins University; and the Westward Migration and Gold Rush Collections from the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Bringing such superb materials online will not only increase the total number of digital books and related images available to scholars and the general public, but will also advance the cause of free universal access by showing that five leading institutions have opted for OCA's open-access, non-proprietary online library over more restrictive proprietary alternatives. Director of Projects: Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian.

The Library of Congress (LoC), with over 30 million books and 38 million manuscripts, is the largest library in the world. To date, the LoC's major scanning efforts have been directed toward unique items in its collections, like maps, photos, and manuscript pages. From its vast holdings, LoC has digitized fewer than 2,000 books, many for special web presentations. It has not yet undertaken a systematic, large-scale book digitization effort. With this grant, the LoC will digitize some 136,000 high-value public domain books, 100,000 of which will be from its prestigious American Imprint collection, all in the public domain and most pre-1923. The digitization will be carried out along principles of the Open Content Alliance, i.e., the digital book files will be available for free and unrestricted access by scholars, academics, journalists, and members of the public anywhere in the world. The project also involves application development efforts to improve digitization capabilities, including capture of high-level structural metadata, page turner applications, and scanning and presenting foldouts. Many libraries look to the LoC and tend to follow its lead. This project not only will create significant additional digital content, but it will also increase capabilities for mass digitization that other libraries everywhere can emulate. It will also serve as a pilot demonstration of the feasibility and utility of an approach to mass digitization that may allow the LoC to go to Congress with strong evidence that this is an investment that should be taken on by the federal government. Project Director: Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services.

The New Orleans Public Library (NOPL) lost two-thirds of its book collection and saw 8 of 13 branches severely impacted by Hurricane Katrina. This Foundation grant supports a project to install an Espresso Book Machine in the library. The newly designed machine, using innovative technology that enables efficient and inexpensive downloading, printing, and binding of public domain books, will help rebuild the library's book collection and supply teachers and students with needed books for their reading lists. Digital files from the Open Content Alliance (see preceding grants to the Internet Archive) will be available for the books to be reproduced for the library. Engaging three software developers to produce new software to convert digital texts from "screen viewable" to "print ready" will be funded with this grant. Two of the developers will focus on making the Open Content Alliance book collection print-ready and fully searchable. The third will ensure that Alliance texts can be transferred, manipulated, and produced in physical book form by the Espresso Book Machine. The New Orleans Public Library will dedicate one librarian to the book machine and a technician from On Demand Books, Inc. will take care of technical problems. Project Director: Elizabeth A. Konrad, Head, Technical Services.