The Boston Public Library (BPL) has joined forces with PublicResource.org and the Internet Archive in order to begin digitizing the library’s large collection of government documents. This project has first envisioned by Mr. Carl Malamud and Mr. Brewster Kahle, the founders of these two collaborating organizations. Mr. Malamud hopes to eventually digitize the entire USA government document collection, which holds around 100 millions pages. The project is expected to take two years, at a cost of $6 million.
This project also hopes to gather a number of other digital collections which are already accessible online, but at a cost. The intent is to buy access to these collections and make their content freely available to everyone. The BPL wants to begin this project by digitizing their holdings relating to the Committee on Un-American Activities hearings from the 1950s, as well as a substantial collection of Congressional Hearings recently donated by Harvard.
In the future the BPL wishes to begins their own digital archive for holdings relating to local Boston and Massachusetts documents.
Here’s to hoping that initiatives such as these continue to prosper, and to make government more accessible and transparent.
You can read more about this from an article in the NYT here.