In the 1990s, the Internet and digital technologies brought astonishing gains in worker productivity and national prosperity. Today, people can leverage that investment and buoy economic recovery by hiring people to move the collections of libraries and cultural-memory organizations--the raw material of the information age--to the Web. Investing in an open, universal digital commons will help ease the current economic crisis by creating jobs, equipping workers with 21st-century skills, and laying a foundation for innovation and national competitiveness in business and research. The author stresses that mass digitization of vast library and other cultural holdings is a job-intensive infrastructure project worthy of federal backing. The effort to digitize library and related cultural-memory holdings would also be an effective response to the mounting problems that challenge America. Beyond retraining workers for technology jobs, such a project would bring high-quality historical, scientific, and cultural materials into every home and workplace.