A National Digital Library

Writing in the New York Review, Robert Darnton makes a compelling call to discuss and resolve the "misplaced worries" that are keeping us from establishing a National Digital Library. He sees its role as fundamental to maintaining our "cultural commons." He writes:

The Founding Fathers did not merely turn out quotable remarks, they meant what they said, and that meaning is valid today—unless you think the Constitution has been rendered obsolete by the Internet. Behind the creation of the American republic was another republic, which made the Constitution thinkable. This was the Republic of Letters—an information system powered by the pen and the printing press, a realm of knowledge open to anyone who could read and write, a community of writers and readers without boundaries, police, or inequality of any kind, except that of talent. Like other men of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers believed that free access to knowledge was a crucial condition for a flourishing republic, and that the American republic would flourish if its citizens exercised their citizenship in the Republic of Letters.