Centuries after Benjamin Franklin praised the role of lending libraries in democratizing American society, the United States finds itself trailing Europe and Japan in creating the modern equivalent: a national digital library that would serve as an electronic repository for the nation’s cultural heritage.

The National Library of Norway has been a global early adopter. In 2005, it announced a goal of digitizing its entire collection; by now it has scanned some 170,000 books, 250,000 newspapers, 610,000 hours of radio broadcasts, 200,000 hours of TV and 500,000 photographs. And, last year, the National Library of the Netherlands said it planned to scan all Dutch books, newspapers and periodicals from 1470 onward.

The libraries of the nearly 50 member states in the Council of Europe, meanwhile, have banded together in a single search engine, theeuropeanlibrary. org. And the European Commission has sponsored Europeana, a portal for digital copies of art, music film and books held by the cultural institutions of member countries. It contains about 15 million artifacts.

A national digital library is a bigger challenge for the United States, with its vast and disparate library holdings. But in the 1990s the Library of Congress created a digital collection called “American Memory”; it now contains 16 million books, maps, movies, manuscripts and pieces of music.

But more than 100 million other artifacts are not yet scanned, says James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress. And though American Memory also carries the name “national digital library,” it is not connected to many public libraries.

“ There has been no national coordination of all the wonderful disparate projects around the country,” says David S. Ferriero, the United States archivist.

But the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University intends to help public and private groups create a “digital public library of America.”

The idea, says Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library , is to make the electronic resources of university libraries and cultural institutions like the Library of Congress accessible through a single portal, “a gigantic digital library that would make the cultural heritage of the country available to everyone.”

The idea for an American digital public library was prompted in part by Google, which since 2004 has digitized more than 15 million books.

“Google came along and woke everyone up and showed the world what could be done in a short period of time,” says Maura Marx, a Berkman Center fellow.

An American digital public library would serve as a nonprofit institutional alternative to Google Books, Professor Darnton says.

“There’s a conflict between the raison d’etre of Google, which is to make money for its shareholders,” he says, “and libraries whose goal is to make books available to readers.”

Jill Cousins, the executive director of Europeana, says that the great American research libraries could do much more than increase access to scholarly matter.

“What’s sort of missing is digitization of the accessible literature,” like the popular novels and biographies readers seek at brick-and-mortar public libraries, she says.


By NATASHA SINGER