In October 2010, Robert Darnton, the historian and university librarian at Harvard, talked to Wired Campus about the possibility of building what was then being described as a National Digital Library. Since then, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with money from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has stepped into the role of coordinating plans for what’s now being designated a Digital Public Library of America.

The planning has a public component as well: The Berkman Center has set up a wiki to which anyone can contribute. “We very much hope that this wiki will be the embodiment of a consensus-based and peer-produced approach,” the center notes on the welcome page.

The wiki lays out major topics related to the proposed DPLA project: content and scope (which includes a handy roundup of digitizing projects in the United States and abroad), governance and business models, legal and technical issues. It’s early days, but to get a sense of how the conversation’s shaping up, check out the most active pages on the wiki. (It’s also instructive to poke around the least-revised pages so far.)

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Out here in California our governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has started a Free Digital Textbook Initiative. The theory is that too much of our California budget is spent on the print version and this is certainly true. The results, thus far, are mixed.

Yes, an initial group of textbooks have been released. Some of the textbooks do a great job of meeting our state’s content standards and some are not particularly close. This is the issue. You can’t do free if free handicaps the students.

Clearly, I am  looking at this because it has come up in my day job. It is certainly intriguing, but a little problematic as well. Out here we have the Williams Settlement which requires us to make sure all students have a textbook checked out specifically to them (because we didn’t always do a good job of that and now we need to deal with the fall-out). If you use digital textbooks, there are similar rules. You can either:

• provide the student with the electronic equipment necessary to view the digital version; or
• provide the student with a print-out of the digital version.

Anyone out there work for a school or a district that used digital textbooks, free or commercial, in a meaningful way? It would be helpful to see where others have gone.