The PA Liberty Project, which is planning to  make digital rights management electronic books available to public and school libraries, has announced today, Thursday May 12th, that the site http://catalog.paliberty.net has now begun limited testing.  The testing is designed to test usability, training procedures and to find problems with the system.

PaLiberty Project is an eBook management system designed to provide access, via libraries, to eBooks that are not typically offered by commercial eBook aggregators like Overdrive. This would include small press titles, local authors, and children’s titles. PaLiberty will provide authentication, storage, a public interface, and digital rights management.

John Brice, Co-chair of the project, stated that “This first round of testing is designed to find problems with the system and to gauge how the software works with the public.  This first round of testing will be limited to those in the library community who work for libraries.”

Asked when the Project will be rolled out to the public Brice stated “The actual roll-out is based on how the testing goes.  After this first round of testing concludes this summer there will be a large beta test in the fall to make sure the project can sustain the traffic demands for providing DRM’ed eBooks across the Commonwealth.”

Anyone who works for a public library is invited to participate in the PA Liberty Project testing.  The first step of the process is to  fill out the form.

For more information, contact
John Brice, Executive Director,
Meadville Public Library.