In the summer of 2004, Carnegie Corporation commissioned a report about issues relating to the construction of a virtual library. The study, written by Tamara Kummer, a graduate student currently pursing a Master’s degree in comparative politics at the London School of Economic and Political Science, analyzes not only the technical challenges of creating a virtual library (which include the storage capacity of hard drives and servers that would be used as the core of a virtual library), but the legal and ethical issues as well.

Certainly, the question of how to deal with international copyright restrictions is a focus of the discussion of legal issues, but the report also considers problems relating to the “authority for selection of materials” that will be included in such a library: does a librarian make the selection, is it a collaborative decision among users, is choice dictated by cost or what can be collected from public domain materials? As the report notes—in relation to materials that would be downloaded from the Web and made available via a local area network connected to the virtual library—“The person collecting materials from the Internet effectively acts as a
filter between the users and what would potentially be available to them should they have access to the Internet.”

Also discussed in the report are projects that are dedicated to sharing “literature, scholarly research and course materials free both of cost and copyright restrictions.” These include Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.net); the MIT Open Courseware Initiative (www.ocw.mit.edu); The Avalon Project site at Yale (www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm) and The Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org).

Virtual Library Model: A Report to Carnegie Corporation of New York is available on the Corporation’s web site, at this address: www.carnegie.org/sub/pubs/virtlibreport.html