Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Michigan's Google-scanned books are OAI-compliant

From the University of Michigan Library:

The University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce that records from our MBooks collection are available for OAI harvesting. The MBooks collection consists of materials digitized by Google in partnership with the University of Michigan.

Only records for MBooks available in the public domain are exposed. We have split these into sets containing public domain items according to U.S. copyright law, and public domain items worldwide. There are currently over 100,000 records available for harvesting. We anticipate having 1 million records available when the entire U-M collection has been digitized by Google.

In conjunction, we have released our open-source OAI toolkit on SourceForge. This toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in Perl....

Comment.  This is an excellent idea.  I believe Michigan is the first partner in the Google Library project to make its Google-scanned books OAI-compliant.