Guy Dixon, The Race to Digitize the Print Universe, Globe and Mail, December 15, 2004. On some Canadian initiatives crowded out of the spotlight by the Google library project. Excerpt: 'Many major libraries and national archives are digitizing parts of their collections, not as a way of replacing physical libraries, but as an extension of their reach. Libraries at the University of Toronto, for example, already offer recent articles from numerous academic journals on-line to students and faculty. Library and Archives Canada, which combines the former National Library of Canada and National Archives of Canada, has been especially active, scanning millions of pages of documents a year. It has now put all of the publications, including pamphlets and books, printed in Canada in the 18th and 19th century on-line for the public to access, said Ian Wilson, librarian and archivist of Canada. We're building this systematically and we're looking right now at the feasibility of other print material for the 20th century," he said. But even if the archive digitizes several million pages a year over 10 years, it will still have only less than half of 1 per cent of the national archives on-line, Wilson added.' (Thanks to Science Library Pad.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/20/2004 11:11:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
