Abstract This article compares and contrasts the assumptions and motivations behind the American public library movement in the nineteenth century to the assumptions and motivations behind the digital library movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. It suggests that although the motivations between these two initiatives were starkly different, their motivations dovetail within the more recent phenomenon of large-scale digitization of the sort pursued by the Google Books Library Project and the Internet Archive. The article also interrogates the role of the public (or lack thereof) in the initial shaping of all three phenomena: public libraries, digital libraries, and large-scale digitization initiatives.

中文翻译：

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公共图书馆运动、数字图书馆运动和大规模数字化倡议：假设、意图和公众的作用

摘要 本文将 19 世纪美国公共图书馆运动背后的假设和动机与 1990 年代和 2000 年代初期数字图书馆运动背后的假设和动机进行了比较和对比。这表明，尽管这两项举措之间的动机截然不同，但它们的动机与谷歌图书图书馆项目和互联网档案馆所追求的大规模数字化现象相吻合。文章还询问了公众（或缺乏公众）在所有三种现象的初步形成中的作用：公共图书馆、数字图书馆和大规模数字化计划。