An article in The New York Times, "Knowlege Lost in a Digital Age - Struggling to Preserve Collective Memory in an Online World" highlighted the problem libraries are having, mainly financial, with putting their collections online. Only a small percent of material makes it to the web. Google has donated $3million to help an initiative, led by the Library of Congress, that will digitize and share materials around the world. When Google digitalized some of the National Archives' films, and put them on its site,( www.video.google.com/nara.htm) , there were 200,000 hits in the first month, compared to 200 requests to the research room in the previous year. Copyright places serious restrictions on the effort to make material available online, as does the physicality of how to copy it, so the main focus so far has been on books and other printed material.
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