The University of Pittsburgh is digitizing is Darlington Library for OA. See the details in the PittChronicle for January 8, 2007 (scroll to p. 3). (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Excerpt:
From a ledger of Fort Pitt business transactions during the 1750s to early published accounts of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the treasures that make up Pitt’s Darlington Memorial Library soon will be accessible far beyond the library’s physical location on the Cathedral of Learning’s sixth floor.
Digitizing the Darlington library’s massive collection—comprising some 11,000 books, 3,000 photographs, hundreds of maps, letters, rare pamphlets, and other materials pertaining to the history of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Colonial America, and more—is the latest undertaking of Pitt’s Digital Research Library (DRL), part of the University Library System.
DRL’s goal is to make the Darlington material accessible and searchable online to scholars, researchers, and history buffs worldwide....
[Pittsburgh's University LIbrary System] is contributing digitized Darlington books to the Open Content Alliance, a collaborative effort by cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.
The idea of making the entire Darlington Library available to people worldwide is exciting to Galloway.
“Once you digitize books and other materials and put them online, their usage increases tenfold, maybe even higher,” he says.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/31/2007 12:21:00 PM.
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.
