My One True Ex hears from her mother a rumor of an effort to “put the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress and the British Library on line”, and commands me to ask my Vast Network of Contacts what substance there is to it.

Mike Linksvayer promptly responds:

. . . you probably heard indirectly of [press release] which includes the NYPL and several universities, but not the LoC or British Library AFAIK. The Internet Archive also has several scanning projects involving various universities and grants from the LoC and British National Archives among others, see [press release]. Perhaps a news story mentioned both archive.org and Google.