Internet Archive – When a Library Closes

I like this latest update from the Internet Archive. Their news release read:

“‘For a poet, the library is life’, mused Valerie Deering, Marygrove College Class of 1972. So when her beloved alma mater in Detroit closed for good in 2019, Deering worried about what would happen to Marygrove’s 70,000-volume library. For more than a century, the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who founded the college, had been curating a one-of-a-kind collection of books about social justice, African American history and Detroit. How could these precious books do the most good in the world? Marygrove’s solution: donate the books to the Internet Archive to be digitized and preserved. Now, less than a year after the physical library closed, the Marygrove College Library Digital Collection is open for borrowing.”

The collection of books can be found at https://archive.org/details/marygrovecollege. I’ve noted that the book ‘Called Up, Sent Down : the Bevin Boys’ War’ by Tom Hickman is available, so I will peruse that today. There’s some question about the legality of this, but I hope they find a way forwards at the Internet Archive, this is a wonderful contribution towards literature.