Although librarians have been interested in creating a more expansive digital library for about 15 years, progress in mass digitization now is making this a more viable goal, said Maura Marx, a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and executive director of the Open Knowledge Commons.

Books and other analog content also are being digitized at MSU — although not in conjunction in the national project — through the Digital and Multimedia Center, said Shawn Nicholson, head of the Digital and Multimedia Center and assistant director of the Digital Information Division of MSU libraries.

The process is helping to make knowledge “more universally available,” said Cliff Haka, director of MSU libraries. Content is made available to a wider audience, not only MSU students, he said. “Just about everything we digitize, we put up on the web for free,” he said.

Digital textbooks help circumvent the problem of carrying textbooks around, prenursing sophomore Lindsay Sevec said. Access to hundreds of digital books also would make writing research papers easier, she said.

“Even at the library I don’t take my huge textbooks,” she said. “I think I would get more detail and learning out of it if I just had (textbooks and other digital books) on my computer.”

The Digital Public Library of America would provide students with “resources at your fingertips,” said Doron Weber, vice president of programs at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which is providing funding for the initial planning meetings. This resource would enable students to access information from libraries across the country previously unavailable to them, he said.

Concrete plans for the library and its creation have not been made yet, Marx said. Participants will be meeting Monday and Tuesday in Cambridge, Mass., to further discuss plans for the library and what should be included at its launch, she said.

As part of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, or CIC, a group of universities mostly comprised of Big Ten schools, MSU supports Google Books’ efforts to make literature available online, Nicholson said. The university has plans to provide content for Google Books in the future, although the university has not done so yet, he said.

The university also is involved in funding and governance of HathiTrust, an organization which grew out of Google Books and works to provide free access to literature, Nicholson said. The university has plans to provide content to HathiTrust as well, he said. Although some books are available to access for free through Google Books, the organization is for-profit and might charge for full access to some, he added.

Libraries and other organizations have been working to digitize content for years, Marx said. Members of the steering committee now are working to create a unified database of the information for the library, she said.

“There’s already a significant amount of information available, we just (need to make it) discoverable and usable for people who want to (access) it,” Marx said.