According to legend, fire devastated the Great Library of Alexandria during a siege of the Egyptian city by Julius Caesar in 44 BCE.

In our own time, when research and analysis is found increasingly in digital form, a similar break in the knowledge timeline has started to open.

The recently launched Policy Commons hopes to fireproof the online library of the Internet, at least where it comes to policy documents and research papers.

Policy Commons makes available for discovery and access nearly two-and-a-half-million documents from thousands of IGOs, NGOs, research centers and think tanks. Policy Commons is the first project for the start-up Coherent Digital, which is collaborating with librarians, technologists, publishers, and academics to tame large bodies of content and make valuable information cohesive, understandable, harmonious – and coherent.

Coherent Digital co-founder Toby Green says there is a vital need to preserve born-digital policy content published by the world's policy organizations, many of which have relatively short life spans.

“In building Policy Commons, we’ve identified over 200 think tanks and NGOs that have gone out of business, and we’ve been tracking down their content and recuperating it, and making it available again inside Policy Commons,” Green tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“We found someone attempting to build [their own] policy commons back 10 years ago. They ran out of funding after they got to about 30,000 records, and so we’ve now saved that content. All that content’s now available inside Policy Commons.

“I’m also in discussions at the moment with an African archive that’s pulling together NGO content in the continent of Africa, and they’ve got about 5,000 reports in their repository. Their funding has run out – it runs out at the end of this year – and if they don’t get new funding, that service is going to come to an end. So again I’m talking to them to see whether we can help keep what they’re doing going.

“And all of this content is valuable content. It’s just as valuable as the content is in journals or book series from the major publishers.”