By continuing to find new opportunities to make older Boston Public books? often lost or just inaccessible to the public? available online? Boston Public Library is sparking new enthusiasm among the reading public.
“It’s like a giant treasure hunt for book lovers that just keeps renewing itself?” said BPL President David Leonard.
As one of the nations oldest Boston Public
First municipally funded public libraries in the United States? the whatsapp lead Boston Public Library (BPL) holds an estimated 23 million items in its collection. It is one of the three largest in the country along with the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library.
“Libraries that are thriving the most are the ones that are The BPL cites at least one reinventing themselves? responding to new demand and new modes of access? simultaneously keeping one foot in traditional services and engaging with the public in new ways?” said Leonard “and that goes for our physical spaces and for our collections.”
BPL has long been a leader in the digitization and scanning of materials and was the first library to partner with the Internet Archive to pilot access via Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) services in 2011. CDL is the online or digital equivalent of traditional library lending – ‘one copy owned? one copy lent’.
The CDL pilot began in
Boston as a way of both preserving and giving access to whatsapp filter family genealogies and historical cookbooks? and materials that were stored deep in the stacks and rarely circulated. The first pilot was a success and BPL is moving to its next pilot now offering ‘one patron? one copy at-a-time’ access to scanned copies of certain older printed books from the 50?000 historic children’s books in the Alice Jordan Collection? which is housed in closed stacks and unavailable to the public in physical form. for the first time? limited to where the BPL’s catalog overlaps with the Internet Archives’ already scanned materials.