Internet Archive has received a $1 million dollar grant from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – to digitise titles from university press collections to make them available via controlled digital lending. The project, Unlocking University Press Books, will bring more than 15,000 titles online from university presses. This project extends the successful pilot with MIT Press, which has already made more than 400 books available for digital learners around the world. This scheme is specifically open to and inclusive of UK university presses.
Today, for many learners, if a book isn’t digital or discoverable through a web search, it’s as if it doesn’t exist. Large-scale digitisation projects have brought millions of books online, largely from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but almost a century of knowledge still lives only on the printed page, inaccessible to scholars, journalists and online learners.
To bring important twentieth century scholarship online, the Internet Archive seeks partnerships with university presses to digitise their publications. These materials represent the preeminent scholarly output of research universities, presenting research and analysis of use to policymakers and scholars, and providing materials that help shape and inform a literate culture.
“Every online user should have access to a great digital library,” said Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, “We are grateful to Arcadia for their support of this project, which will make the unique research published by university presses available to even wider audiences.”
“We are very excited about this transformational program,” said Dean Smith, Director of Cornell University Press. “We take our mission as the nation’s first university press seriously—to make high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship discoverable and accessible to the world. The Internet Archive is perfectly aligned with that mission and will greatly assist us in taking bold actions to unearth these titles and provide access options.”
To participate in the project, please complete the Internet Archive signup form. Please contact Chris Freeland, Director of Open Libraries, at chrisfreeland@archive.org with additional questions.
This post was first published at the Internet Archive blog on May 21st, 2018.
Dr Ross Mounce
Director of Open Access Programmes, Arcadia
