ALA Annual 2011: Internet Archive's In-Library Lending Program Signs 1,000 Libraries
By Michael Kelley June 25, 2011>The In-Library Lending program—started only three months ago by the Internet Archive—has been experiencing exponential growth, according to Brewster Kahle, the archive's founder.
"Today, we now just got our one thousandth library joining in six countries to join into this movement," he announced Saturday to a packed room at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans during the American Library Association's annual conference.
The project, a kind of virtual consortium for the lending of ebooks, began in March with only 150 participating libraries.
"We've been doing this at scale, and it's working. This is a good thing for all of us," explained Kahle, a last minute addition to a panel about the impact of ebooks on library services.
New participants in the program include the Colorado Public Library Consortium; the state library of Kansas, whose director, Jo Budler, signed up all the public libraries in the state; the state libraries of California and North Carolina; and libraries in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, China, and Colombia.
These libraries contribute in-copyright, out-of-print titles that are scanned and go into a pool of available works. Individual libraries, not the Internet Archive, determine lending rights for in-copyright works, and the libraries choose what books they wish to include. A patron can borrow up to five titles from the 100,000 books in the collection for two weeks at no charge.
The Open Library, another Internet Archive project where users can read more than one million ebooks without restriction, hosts the ebooks. Patrons can choose either an in-browser version, or a PDF or ePub version, managed by the Adobe Digital Editions software.
Kahle also said that the books can be accessed either through the Open Library website but also through the catalog of a library whose IP address has been turned on.
"You can either download the 100,000 MARC records and add them to your collection-or probably better yet is to go back and use the API to go and display exactly what its version is now," he said. Some of the catalog integration is still being worked on.
"We see this as a way through the thicket to get to millions of books where there are lots of winners and no centralized points of control," Kahle said.
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