The Verizon Foundation is funding the digitization and OA of 20,000 pages of George Washington's writings. From yesterday's press release:
The Constitutional Sources Project, the only free fully-indexed online library of Constitutional sources, announced it is receiving an $80,000 grant from the Verizon Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Verizon Communications, to digitize approximately 20,000 [pages] of George Washington's writings. The digital collection will be accessible [starting February 13, 2008] in raw text format and will provide public access to thousands of documents that have lain dormant and inaccessible since our nation's inception....
In conjunction with the digitization of George Washington's papers, ConSource announces the release of a public online proofreading tool to facilitate the transcription process for these precious historical documents. After documents are scanned and converted to text, a process which typically renders the text 90-95 percent accurate, anyone with Internet access who meets a few simple reading qualifications can volunteer through ConSource.org to proofread the transcriptions along-side the original source, improving the accuracy and legibility of the documents. After the review, the document's transcription will be given the ConSource certification seal of accuracy and placed in the ConSource Archive.
As the papers are proofread by the public, ConSource staff will add images of the original documents from all of the 300+ private and public archives housing George Washington's documents included in the project....
Last year, the Verizon Foundation committed more than $31 million to Thinkfinity.org, which provides more than 55,000 educational resources, K-12 lesson plans and student interactives online for free.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/31/2008 09:45:00 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.
