Last week, the Internet Archive's open library forum was devoted to the practice and possibilities of controlled digital lending, a way of relying on fair use to begin to make in-copyright library materials available to the public digitally while respecting copyright and complying with the law.  Three recent documents:

1.  a longer white paper on the subject:  https://osf.io/preprints/lawarxiv/7fdyr/    Further document is included at https://controlleddigitallending.org/readings

2.  a more concise 'position statement' authored by legal scholars at Harvard, NYU, Georgetown, Duke, and the Internet Archive:  https://controlleddigitallending.org/statement

3.  an even more concise blog post by Duke's scholarly communications librarian David Hansen summarizing the issues:  https://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2018/09/28/controlled-digital-lending-of-library-books/

The problem addressed is critical, what Brewster Kahle of the IA calls "the loss of the twentieth century" -- our collective inability to access the bulk of the material in our library collections, from the 1920s forward, in any form other than print.  

Jim O'Donnell

Arizona State University