Deepening our understanding of our Nation and its culture and history, advancing scientific discovery, tackling environmental, economic issues and more, all depend on scientists, researchers, students, scholars, and members of the public accessing our Nation’s cultural, historical and scientific assets. A large-scale initiative to digitize and preserve the public domain collections of library, governmental, and cultural memory organizations will support research, teaching and learning at all levels, will help stem the current economic crisis by equipping and employing workers in every state with 21st Century skills, and it will lay a foundation for innovation and national competitiveness in the decades ahead. The goal is to establish a universal, open library or a digital data commons....
Examples of resources include:
Digitized full-text scientific and technical R&D reports dating from 1940s to present.
A wealth of resources such as non-text scientific research data including images, audio, video, and numeric data.
Legacy collections of government agencies spanning over 200 years and covering virtually every facet of U.S. history, government, policy and administration.
Course materials, including non-print media, developed throughout the Nation. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has already demonstrated the strong demand for its faculty’s lectures and related resources with their Open Courseware project....
For example, in collaboration with libraries and aided by contributions from foundations, the non-profit Internet Archive has put a million printed books online. It currently operates 18 U.S. scanning centers with capacity to employ 600 people. With an injection of funds to numerous institutions and organizations, the rate of digitization could be quickly ramped up. It is estimated that with a graduated order, 10,000 individuals in all 50 states could be trained and put to work scanning books, manuscripts, journals, and other public domain materials. With the inclusion of other resources, these numbers would increase....
A large-scale initiative to digitize public domain collections meets just about any test of an effective response to the mounting problems that challenge the United States. Beyond retraining workers with new, valuable skill sets and putting them to work, this initiative will bring high-quality public domain resources into every home, school, community college, university and workplace. It will give businesses, state and local governments, and jobseekers needed resources and will enrich education at all levels by bringing the world’s collective knowledge to parents, teachers, and students. Finally, these scientific, cultural and historical assets will provide much needed content to the extended deployment of broadband throughout the country. Above all, these online, high value intellectual resources will remain available permanently to the Nation as research libraries will provide long-term preservation and access to the digitized content.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
