EveryLibrary Institute Joins the “Our Future Memory” Coalition

The EveryLibrary Institute is proud to announce that we have joined the Our Future Memory coalition and formally endorsed the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online.

This global, multi-sector coalition brings together libraries, archives, museums, legal scholars, digital rights advocates, researchers, and cultural institutions around a shared commitment to explore and strengthen the essential rights and responsibilities that memory institutions have always exercised offline, which must be protected and strengthened in the digital world.

Libraries, archives, and museums are foundational civic and educational institutions. As the Statement on Digital Rights affirms, they preserve and provide long-term access to the cultural, artistic, and scientific knowledge that forms our collective intellectual heritage. They democratize access to information, enable education and research, support creators and journalists, and allow people, regardless of income, geography, or circumstance, to participate fully in public life.

However, in today’s digital environment, that mission is increasingly constrained. Large portions of the cultural record remain undigitized and inaccessible. At the same time, much of what is digital is locked inside commercial platforms that restrict preservation, access, and long-term stewardship, leaving memory institutions like libraries, archives, and museums with fewer practical tools to serve the public than they had in the physical era.

The Four Digital Rights of Memory Institutions

At the heart of the “Our Future Memory” movement are four essential rights that EveryLibrary Institute embraces. To fulfill their public mission in the digital age, memory institutions must have the legal and practical ability to:

• Collect digital materials, including through digitization and lawful acquisition;
• Preserve digital works, including repair, backup, and reformatting for long-term access;
• Provide controlled access to digital collections for research and public use; and
• Cooperate across institutions by sharing and transferring digital collections to strengthen preservation and access.

These goals are the modern equivalents of the core functions that libraries and cultural institutions have exercised for centuries. For the EveryLibrary Institute, this commitment grows from a core policy thesis that has guided our work on digital rights for years. We believe that public institutions should be funded within the tax code, and that a sustainable future for libraries, education, and the creative economy requires a meaningful extension of the principles of First Sale Doctrine and ownership into the digital environment. Libraries exist because of a willingness of citizens to fund the common good through a progressive tax policy and the ability of libraries to lend, which requires the ability to legally purchase an item, not just license it. The sector must be able to explore and expand on practices like Controlled Digital Lending within a fair copyright regime.

Together, these principles form the legal foundation that made public libraries possible. They are also the foundation of the creative economy itself, which copyright law is intended to support and extend. Today, that foundation is under strain. As reading and publishing increasingly move into digital formats, with roughly a quarter to a third of all reading sourced through public libraries, we face a policy paradox. Libraries are being asked to serve a digital public, but are often denied meaningful ownership of the digital materials their communities rely upon. Without the right to acquire, preserve, and lend digital works on par with print, libraries lose one of their core civic functions, and the creative ecosystem that depends on them begins to fracture.

Digital formats are one of the most powerful democratizing forces the reading world has ever known. Digital formats expand access, diversify voices, lower barriers to publication, and connect readers with writers and publishers across borders and backgrounds. Libraries are deeply invested in this diversification of formats. The challenge is that policy and law governing digital goods have not evolved to keep pace with technological and societal changes, resulting in gaps that limit how memory institutions can fulfill their missions. When libraries cannot meaningfully buy, preserve, or lend digital works, the right to read becomes hollow long before any censorship fight begins.

Our Commitment to the Coalition

By joining the Our Future Memory coalition and endorsing the Statement on Digital Rights for Protecting Memory Institutions Online, the EveryLibrary Institute is hoping to advance a broader conversation that reaches beyond copyright reform alone and asks deeper questions about ownership, stewardship, creativity, and the future of reading in a digital society. We believe that this conversation must include libraries and educators, but also independent booksellers, independent publishers, authors, technologists, policymakers, and readers themselves. The health of the creative economy and our democratic society depends on getting this right.

As part of the Our Future Memory coalition, the EveryLibrary Institute commits to advancing the Four Digital Rights in policy and practice; supporting research and public education around digital access and preservation; elevating the voices of memory institutions worldwide; and advocating for legal frameworks that protect the essential public role of libraries, archives, and museums. We invite our colleagues to learn more and join this vital global effort at https://ourfuturememory.org. Our collective future depends on our actions. Knowledge preservation is a public good, not a private commodity. The decisions we make today will determine what knowledge the public retains tomorrow, and who will be allowed to access it.

Interested libraries and memory institutions can learn more about the Coalition and Statement at an information webinar on Tuesday, January 27 at 1pm est / 10am pst hosted by the Internet Archive. Visit https://blog.archive.org/event/protect-our-future-memory-join-the-call-for-library-digital-rights/ for details and a link to register for free.