Brewster talked about the possibility of creating a modern Library of Alexandria, an online open access library of everything.
He stepped through various media types, outlining the possibilities, probabilities, difficulties and current state of play with each: texts, audio, moving image, software and web.
Interestingly the biggest hurdle to overcome isn't the volume of data, but rather the legal issues surrounding copyright, access and usage.
Of course many works [are] in the public domain and are able to be digitised, and Brewster's organisation already have 150 000 books, 100 000 audio recordings, 55 000 movies and billions of webpages available, as he put it, for free and forever. These numbers are growing rapidly: for example, over 12 000 printed books are being scanned (at a cost of about 30¢ per page) every month! ...
In concluding his presentation, Brewster challenged us, the museum community, to let go of some of our control over our content, and in return use Internet Archive's unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth for free, for ever!
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/15/2007 11:46:00 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.
