2018 MOBIUS Annual Conference

Book scanning projects have made tremendous strides in bringing public domain literature online for the world's scholars and enthusiasts, but materials published after 1923 are still not widely available due to copyright restrictions. The Internet Archive has developed a controlled digital lending framework that enables libraries to digitize and lend an ebook of a non-circulating physical volume stored on their shelves. Through controlled digital lending, libraries can make available the 20th-century scholarship that is largely absent from their digital holdings in a way that respects the rights of authors and publishers. Controlled digital lending works at consortia-scale as well, enabling groups of libraries to pool their print collections and lend ebooks against non-circulating copies.