In the first year, UNC Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University will each convert 2,700 public domain books into high-resolution, downloadable, reusable digital files that can be indexed locally and by any web search engine. UNC Chapel Hill and NCSU will start by each hosting one state-of-the-art Scribe machine provided by the Internet Archive to scan the materials at a cost of just 10 cents per page. Each university library will focus on historic collection strengths, such as plant and animal sciences, engineering and physical science at NCSU and social sciences and humanities at UNC-Chapel Hill. Duke University will also contribute select content for digitization during the first year of the collaborative project.
By collaborating on their membership in the OCA, the UNC Chapel Hill and NCSU libraries are building on long-standing TRLN cooperative arrangements and principles for sharing collections, technology, and expertise to create a rich knowledge environment that furthers the member universities' teaching, research, and service missions. Because 70% of the titles held within TRLN are unique to a single institution, cooperative digitization through efforts such as the OCA offer the opportunity to expand access to and use of the extensive research collections held within TRLN. Through the OCA partnership, TRLN is also working to develop shared principles for digitization and the long-term preservation of digitized content.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 2/21/2008 09:07:00 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.
