Since the mid-1990s, libraries were studying how to store an enormous
amount of data, and make it available on the internet through a
reliable search engine. Library 2000 was a project run between 1995 and
1998 by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology) to explore the implications of large scale
online storage, using the digital library of the future as an example.
It developed a prototype using the technology and system configurations
expected to be economically feasible in 2000. Another project was the
Digital Library Initiative, supported by grants from NSF (National
Science Foundation), DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency),
and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). As mentioned
on the Digital Library Initiative's website in 1998: "The Initiative's
focus is to dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and
organize information in digital forms, and make it available for
searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks - all
in user-friendly ways."