A consortium of librarians and scholars from across the country, including faculty members from Harvard University, met yesterday in Washington to work on creating the proposed Digital Public Library of America, an online storehouse stocked with millions of digitized books, images, and video from the nation?s top public and academic libraries.
?Everybody will get to use it, and it will contain everything we can get our hands on,?? said John Palfrey, faculty codirector of Harvard?s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which is home base for the digital library project.
Developers intend to launch a prototype of the service by April 2013. Their efforts will be supported by $5 million in grants from the philanthropies Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund.