Though plants have enormous value for society in terms of food, medicine, the environment, and economics, and hold significant social and cultural value, no single site provides accurate, comprehensive, and open access data on the known species of flowering plants.  This grant to the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) supports its efforts become one of four lead international institutions spearheading the creation of World Flora Online (WFO), the first open access, online resource for accurate and comprehensive information for all of Earth's 350,000 known plant species.  NYBG will also become one of a dozen major content hubs for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), making available not only its first 20,000 plant species records and all 85,000 records when completed, but also depositing over a million existing plant specimen records in DPLA's index, a 15 percent increase in DPLA's current holdings.

This grant to the Wikimedia Foundation provides continued administrative and operational support for Wikipedia, the fifth largest website in the world and the largest encyclopedia in history.  Over the next five years, grant funds will be used in a series of projects to bolster Wikipedia’s technical infrastructure, improve editor engagement, increase the number of women editors, increase the number of contributions via mobile devices, better integrate multimedia offerings such as video, audio, and photography into Wikipedia pages, and help Wikipedia improve and monitor article quality while moving toward self-sustainability.

Funds from this grant provide one year of continued support to efforts by a team led by Pamela Samuelson at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law to examine the legal obstacles posed by copyright law to digital library initiatives and the digital storage and dissemination of in-copyright works. The Berkeley team will examine a diverse range of issues, including orphan works, library and archive copyright exceptions, private ordering solutions, collective licensing for certain copyrighted works, digital lending of in-copyright works, and metadata ownership and use issues. Samuelson’s team will also provide advice and counsel to the Digital Public Library of America on legal issues related its mission and will serve as a locus for informed legal discussion of copyright issues in the digital age.

This grant provides two years of continued support for the development, launch, and operation of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Scheduled to launch in April 2013, the DPLA aims to create an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that will make the nation's scientific and cultural heritage universally accessible to the public. Funds from this grant support the continued development of the DPLA platform architecture and interface, community-building efforts and technical support to expand and strengthen the growing network of content providers, and administrative funds for the hiring of an executive director and two full time staff members.

Orphan works are those works whose copyright owners are either unknown or un-locatable after a diligent search. They comprise a significant percentage of all copyright works. (For example, about 50 percent of Haathi Trust's 10 million volumes are estimated to be orphan works.) Because libraries and archives are wary of running afoul of copyright restrictions on orphan works, they often avoid digitizing them or making them available online, thus vastly limiting public access to millions of important books and documents. This grant funds a project by American University law professor Peter Jaszi to develop best practice guidelines for the legal digitization and distribution of orphan works. Funds will support an initial paper explaining the legal obstacles to the dissemination of orphan works, 10 focus group sessions to discuss orphan work issues and policies with relevant stakeholders around the country, a paper outlying best practices, and dissemination activities to publicize those practices to libraries, universities, museums, and other stakeholders.

This grant to John Palfrey and Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Berkman Center) provides funding for an intense process of meetings, workshops, plenaries, research, pilot digitization, technical prototype development, and community building that will lead to the launch of a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Over the next two years, Palfrey and his team will coordinate at least 22 workshops divided among six major interrelated workstreams covering various aspects of the DPLA: content and scope, audience participation, technical architecture, finance/business models, legal issues, and governance. Each workstream will arrive at a plan of action for ensuring the best outcome for an integrated national digital library system that provides seamless access to digital resources.