Six leading educational institutions, including the British Library and the New York Public Library, announced April 3 that they are forming Fathom, a new company that will offer “the first home for authenticated knowledge on the Internet.”
The Fathom site, expected to debut later this year, will make available resources from the two libraries and the other four founding organizations—Columbia University, Cambridge University Press, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History—as well as other universities, libraries, and museums expected to join the consortium later.
In addition to online courses, textbooks, periodicals, CD-ROMs, and learning resources, the for-profit site will offer much free content, including multimedia lectures, seminars, databases, publications, and performances in a wide range of subjects.
Some of the material currently being developed for the site includes over 54,000 photographs of New York City from the New York Public Library and multimedia presentations featuring such documents as the Magna Carta and the Lindisfarne Gospels from the British Library.
Posted April 10, 2000.