After his own experience dealing with a mortgage mess, Nye Lavalle set out to learn all he could about the mortgage industry, traveling nationwide to dig into records. In 2003, he compiled a dossier of practices at Fannie Mae. In hindsight, the problems he found look like a blueprint of today's foreclosure crisis.
"If we can no longer provide information to the public because of rules and fees dictated to us by the rights holders, what purpose would we serve?... If we cannot secure these rights, it is not only libraries that lose but also our patrons. They will lose access to the depth and breadth of human knowledge."