“Many liberals and libertarians—I myself am emphatically on the progressive side—would write off the dream of a genuinely public national digital library system to achieve the above goals. With conservative Republicans dominating the House of Representatives, how could the money ever materialize? ‘So,’ in effect argue some supporters of the Digital Public Library of America, the promising library initiative hosted by Harvard’s Berkman Center, ‘why can’t the DPLA actually be the public library system online? We’ll never get a good one otherwise.’ I disagree. As I noted during a March 1 workshop at the Harvard Faculty Club and in a related wiki, a ‘public’library system should be—well, public.”
From David Rothman’s post on LibraryCity.org, “A national digital library system for George Roper in McAllen, Texas, please–not just the American elite—and don’t write off conservatives”