“In today’s rapidly changing access to digital content, it is important that the broader library community works together to build lasting and growing collections of digital content for our customers and communities,” said Paul Takala, Chief Librarian and CEO of Hamilton Public Library. “The Internet Archive has developed a responsible and balanced controlled digital lending (CDL) model. I look forward to a future where all the unique titles we have in our collection – many of which are out of print – can be shared with researchers and learners everywhere. With the Internet Archive’s Open Libraries program, this future is now possible. I encourage all libraries to join this important effort.”
Internet Archive’s Open Libraries buy sales lead program uses controlled digital lending (CDL) to deliver nearly one million volumes of digitized texts to readers and researchers all over the world. Controlled digital lending is a process by which libraries can lend print books to patrons in digitized form, and has been described by copyright experts from major research libraries. Through CDL, libraries use controls to ensure an “owned-to-loaned” ratio, meaning the library circulates the exact number of copies of a specific title it owns, regardless of format, putting controls in place to prevent users from redistributing or copying the digitized version. CDL is not meant to replace existing licensing agreements for modern ebooks; instead, CDL helps libraries provide access to twentieth century publications that don’t have an electronic equivalent.
Participating in Open Libraries is easy. After signing on to the program, libraries share their catalogs with Internet Archive and our engineers perform an overlap analysis to determine the physical books in a library’s collection that match the books we have digitized. Where there’s a match, the Internet Archive returns links and catalog records to the digital book so that the library can include these in their catalog.