“There’s tremendous local activity and national collaboration around specific topics,” says David S. Ferriero, the archivist of the United States. “But there has been no national coordination of all the wonderful disparate projects around the country.”

Some of those individual efforts, however, are now beginning to dovetail.

Last month, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard said it would coordinate a planning program for public and private groups interested in creating a “digital public library of America.”

The idea, says Robert Darnton, the director of the Harvard University Library and one of the project’s originators, is to link the electronic resources of participating university libraries and cultural institutions like the Library of Congress and make them accessible through a single portal. The hope is to create “a gigantic digital library that would make the cultural heritage of the country available to everyone,” he says.

The project would also widen the audience for the kind of historical out-of-print books, manuscripts, letters, images, films and audio clips that have typically been the province of scholars.

Of course, practical matters  like cost, copyright issues and technology  would need to be resolved first.

“The crucial question in many ways is, ‘How do you find a common technical infrastructure that yields interoperability for the scholar, the casual inquirer or the K-12 student?’” Dr. Billington says.

The idea for an American digital public library was prompted in part by the work of Google. In 2004, the company started a digitization project, Google Books, that has since scanned more than 15 million books. Many of these are out-of-print books lent by institutions like Harvard, Cornell and the University of Michigan. “Google came along and woke everyone up and showed the world what could be done in a short period of time,” says Maura Marx, a fellow at the Berkman Center.