According to Palfrey, the committee hopes to host a “very large-scale” event in Washington, D.C. this fall in order to bring together the larger community of stakeholders.

Project organizers have invited the public to an open discussion regarding strategies for improving access to online resources.

Potential stakeholders can stay up to date on the project’s progress by going to its crowd-sourced website where organizers solicit comments.

“Scores of people have been contributing,” said Jerome J. McGann, a member of the Steering Committee and professor from the University of Virginia.

“There are many ideas in play [and] there is nothing hidden right now,” McGann added.

Back in 2005, the University agreed to let Google scan 850,000 volumes that were in the public domain.

Harvard disassociated with the project in 2008, when the company approached Harvard to expand its digitization efforts to include the libraries’ remaining 15 million volumes, which were under copyright protection.

According to Director of the Harvard Library Robert C. Darnton ’60, while Google agreed to pay for the digitization of the books, the firm was not covering costs of transporting the volumes—which would have cost around $1.9 million.

—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Sirui Li can be reached at sli@college.harvard.edu.