David Rothman speculates On A Two Part National Digital Library

David Rothman, the founder of TeleRead, and librarian Tom Peters, have started a new blog called LibraryCity. Here’s what they say about it:

For now, see our introductory post. We are seeking to enrich the Harvard/Berkman discussion of the national digital library issue, but are not a Harvard blog (even though a LibraryCity cofounder attended a Berkman workshop on March 1). Nor are we a competitor of the Harvard initiative. Rather we simply are offering a grassroots perspective on the issue for Harvard, the Library of Congress, the ALA, and others. See Contact for information on Tom Peters and David Rothman, LibraryCity’s organizers.

It’s been around for a while, but I just found it today. In one post David talks about a dual-track library system:

Might the right set of fences be one way to keep the Harvard-hosted Digital Public Library of America from unwittingly weakening the franchise and branding of America’s public libraries in their online incarnation—while we still promoted neighborliness between and among institutions? That’s the solution I’m mulling over right now. Perhaps a National Digital Library of America could serve the public in general and a Scholarly Digital Library of America could enrich the campus community. Both “civilians” and academics could use each other’s library systems for free, at least when copyright and licensing agreement allowed; and the two could pick up the other system’s exportable content and share a common infrastructure and standards. Searching for books simultaneously in both systems would be Kindle-seamless. But fences between the pair could exist on acquisitions issues and practices, interface priorities, most staffing matters, and in various other respects. Hence, the purchases of monographs on Henry James wouldn’t be pitted so directly against, for example, shorter wait times for Stephen King novels, assuming that patron wait times were necessary.