Challenges in Sustaining the Million Book Project, a project supported by the National Science Foundation

One of the main roles I have played as a director of the Universal Digital Library has been to write grant proposals to support our work. Both for this project and for another project—Olive.org, an archive of executable content—how to sustain the final product is the most difficult challenge. This paper discusses the various models that might be adopted to sustain a large corpus of digital material, such as that of the million book project. Methods discussed here include government funding, foundations and non profits, university homes, and joining existing projects. All individuals working with large digital projects should be concerned about how their work will be kept available to the public