Case Studies

Thanks to large-scale digitization projects, today there are millions of books online. However, while these are largely out of copyright books from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more recent scholarship is still only available in print, making them inaccessible to scholars, policy makers journalists and online learners.

The Internet Archive was established in 1996 with the aim of archiving the internet itself. It now serves as a constantly expanding digital library, containing more than 20 years of web history with 330 billion web pages, and millions of cultural artefacts in digital form – from e-books, through live concert recordings to software programmes. The Internet Archive provides free access to everyone who has access to the internet. It serves millions of people every day.

As part of the Internet Archive’s mission to provide universal access to all knowledge, it is now partnering with prominent university presses to make high-quality, peer-reviewed research discoverable and accessible. “Every online user should have access to a great digital library,” said Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. Our grant will help to unlock university press books by digitizing more than 15,000 titles and make them freely available via controlled digital lending.